by Nigel Packer
I must face this alone, Otto thought.
He tried to reassure Daniel.
‘I understand. It’s better if you go. You can spend the next few days with your friends. They’ll look after you, they seem a nice crowd. It isn’t fair to expect you to go through any more.’
Daniel’s head was bowed.
‘I feel terrible,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry…’
Otto’s voice was gentle.
‘I’ll call you. I’ll let you know what’s happening. Let you know when … you know … when it’s finished.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
Daniel’s head turned away for a second. The music from the radio no longer covered their silence.
‘When do you plan to go back?’
‘This evening, I think. I’ll catch the train at seven.’
‘That early? Of course. As you wish.’
Otto looked down at his plate. Daniel watched him, helpless.
‘I’ll need to go back to the house,’ he added, ‘to collect my things. I’ll catch the tube up in a little while.’
Otto checked his watch.
‘Will you come back to the hospice, first? Or would you rather go immediately? I think it’s probably time that I headed back there.’
‘I’ll come. For half an hour or so. I’d like to spend a little time with Mum.’
Otto nodded.
‘Of course.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
‘It’s okay … it’s okay. I understand.’
Otto’s gaze was far away, his words sounded strained. He reached for his wallet and signalled to the waiter, but his actions seemed strangely mechanical. He no longer appeared to inhabit himself.
‘I understand,’ he said again. ‘It’s okay, Daniel. But please don’t catch the Underground back and forth. You look tired. The trains will be busy. Let me arrange a taxi for you, at least.’
* * *
For the next few days, Otto remained at Cynthia’s bedside, occasionally grabbing an hour or two’s sleep on a mattress in a corner of the room. He talked to her often, although she couldn’t hear him: about the past, about their lives, the experiences they had shared. He hoped, somehow, that it would ease her final hours, like the palliative drugs that flowed through her system. But the memories, as he expressed them, were increasingly confused.
‘I didn’t tread on your toes,’ he said. ‘Your puffball skirt was twirling. And then, at the party, all those years later, you wore that henna-dyed dress. You stroked your belly, with Daniel inside, as you chatted away to your friends. You didn’t know you were doing it, of course. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you when I mentioned it that time. But it was unconscious, you see, that gesture of yours, and unconscious gestures are the ones that most reveal us … they’re the ones that stay with those we leave behind…’
The next morning, Otto was woken by an unfamiliar rustling sound. Cynthia was in a state of agitation.
He jumped up from the mattress and called for a nurse.
‘What is it?’ he asked her.
She went away quickly. When she returned, several colleagues were with her.
Cynthia died later that day, with Otto at her side. The final hours of disintegration were difficult. Her vacant body clung instinctively to life, refusing to release her from its hold. And yet, by the middle of the afternoon, all signs of struggle had ceased in her. She lay peaceful and still, her breathing increasingly shallow.
Otto held her hand through her final moments, his head lowered and his eyes closed. Her passing, when it came, was indistinguishable from what had gone before. One form of absence became another. Then, as he opened his eyes and looked once more into her ashen face, a voice from somewhere in the room told him it was over.
Afterwards, when he had recovered some strength, he telephoned Daniel and then Cynthia’s parents. The words they exchanged were kind and gentle: they briefly discussed arrangements for the funeral. Leaving the hospice, he walked the streets aimlessly, finding himself near an entrance to Regent’s Park. There, he sat for a while on a bench beside the boating lake. A chill breeze ruffled its surface. The first of the leaves were turning yellow. It was the blackberry-picking season, Otto realised.
Thirty
Signs greeted Otto on the doors of each lift: COUNCIL ALERTED – REPAIR IMMINENT.
‘Blast,’ he said, looking around and waving his cane at nobody in particular.
Up to this point, he had been fortunate. Only one of the lifts had been out of action at any one time. This afternoon, all four of them had broken at once. Clearly the central pulley system had given up completely.
Just to be certain, he pushed some buttons and held his ear to the doors. No sound of mechanical activity could be heard inside the shaft.
‘Scheiße,’ he added, not especially wishing to begin the journey up the central staircase. He stood around rather pointlessly for a moment, as though hoping for some alternative route to appear. There was not even a sign of any other residents with whom he could at least have shared his displeasure.
‘Fucking building,’ he concluded, as a final insult to the empty hallway, before bracing himself and taking his first tentative steps on the stairs.
This was a nuisance. Otto felt tired, even a little disorientated. He was running late and in danger of missing his flight back to Geneva. If that were to happen, the phone call to Anika would not be one he would relish.
He regretted, now, having made the difficult journey to Bloomsbury. He could have chosen to visit any number of destinations that afternoon, perhaps taken a stroll along the Thames. Yet for some reason he had chosen to inflict that upon himself, and he no longer understood why. The trip had achieved nothing, beyond resurrecting some deeply painful memories, and it had left him feeling physically unwell into the bargain. The tube trains back had been packed and stifling. He couldn’t get a seat and his spine had developed a painful twinge. During the walk up to Marlowe House from the station, his stomach had started to hurt once more.
Otto was at a loss to explain his behaviour.
It must be that maudlin streak again, the one that Cynthia warned me about. She would not have been happy about my choice of sightseeing today. The neurological hospital – what on earth was I thinking?
Just three flights up, with nine more to go, he was already feeling breathless. Resting his hand on the flaking yellow paint of the banister, he glanced above and saw the radiating spokes of the staircase, circling to the furthest reaches of his vision. High, high above him, they disappeared into the darkness near the top.
The air felt solemn and heavy. His footsteps echoed in the silence. He would like to rest, but was aware of how many things he still had to do. Use the lavatory, collect his case, make sure the gas was off and lock the door as he left. Oh, and he must remember to post the key back through the letterbox of his apartment. It seemed straightforward enough, but Otto was of an age when even the simplest actions could take him an eternity. Some hours, some days, were much slower than others. Clearly he wasn’t up to speed today.
Glancing off to the left, he saw a series of narrow windows, running up the walls like arrow slits in a turret. As the sun broke free of a cloud, needle-thin points of light pierced the gloom.
Otto set off again, circling steadily in his ascent – one hand gripping the peeling banister while the other pressed the tip of his cane into the step above. He thought of their walking holiday in the Lake District, all those decades before. Travelling at a steeply sloping angle had seemed straightforward enough back then. Now it felt unnatural, as though he were asking his body to perform some task for which it was simply not designed. With irritation, he pictured himself just a few hours earlier. He remembered gazing up in self-satisfaction at the endless turns of the staircase. Poetic, he had called it then.
‘Silly old sod,’ he muttered.
It wasn’t for him to judge the building’s aesthetic value: he really ought to leave all that to others. Anyway, what was more import
ant: a beautifully crafted staircase or an elevator system that worked properly? This question seemed increasingly pertinent, the higher up he climbed.
Otto wished they had spent more time on the lifts, back when Marlowe House was being planned. They should have focused on improving their quality, maybe at the expense of the ill-fated sculpture garden. Eight sculptures seemed extravagant, with the benefit of hindsight, especially since they had all disappeared or ended up headless.
If the place is saved and given a listing, maybe we can do something about that.
He paused again to look up to the roof, but the intimidating spiral above his head did not appear to have decreased by much. More beads of sweat had broken out on his brow. He mopped these away impatiently with his handkerchief. The great dizziness he was starting to feel, however, was less easy to brush aside.
Oh, for a moving staircase right now, an escalator to glide on …
And then, as if upon command, as if the thought had somehow brought itself into existence, the staircase began to move. Otto felt himself lift slowly forwards, gasping slightly at the unexpected motion. His feet were no longer moving, but somehow he was moving. His body was being propelled by an invisible force. The staircase moved silently, winding steadily upwards, level by level, with no churning of a motor to reveal the hidden source of its magical power.
Once his initial surprise had passed, Otto found himself starting to smile. He even began to giggle in childish delight. The staircase was taking him ever higher: fifth floor, sixth floor, seventh. He had settled down, and was enjoying the ride, when a troubling thought suddenly occurred to him.
What if the escalator didn’t stop moving? Not just on his floor; on any floor. What if it kept going – spiralling ever higher, beyond the rooftop he had stood upon recently, through the clouds and out the other side? What if it kept going until the wind was howling, the sky was deepening from blue to black and he could see the curve of the earth’s surface appear below him? What if it kept going until the oxygen ran out?
At this point, Otto decided it was time to halt the rising staircase. But how exactly did one achieve such a thing? Looking down at his feet, he pushed the cane hard into the step before him, trying through leverage to halt its movement. When this didn’t work, he tried pressing it between a gap in the banisters, leaning on it with all his meagre strength. Some sparks flew up, but it hadn’t quite worked.
As the staircase continued moving, he pulled the cane from between the banisters, steadying himself as he prepared for another attempt. In order to gain greater purchase on the cane, he took a firm step backwards. The staircase seemed to crumble away beneath him. Grasping at the air with both his hands, he tumbled into the void, the only sound the clatter of his cane upon the stairs.
Thirty-One
When he opened his eyes, Otto could see the now stationary staircase stretched high above him, the elegant spokes of its various levels radiating outwards like a mandala. All was peaceful here in the stairwell. It had that special quality of silence – the echoing silence of the old synagogue in Vienna. He breathed in the spacious air, and felt his back resting on cool stone. The experience was pleasant, in its way, apart from the slight aching in his neck and a soreness in his head.
Otto saw his cane lying abandoned on a higher step. He reached out both hands and tried to raise himself towards it, but gravity defied his efforts and he was unable to move very far. Eventually, he gave up the attempt.
He touched his bare forehead with his fingertips. It was coated once more in beads of sweat. With an effort, he reached down and removed the white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his unbuttoned overcoat, slowly wiping it across his brow. He lacked the strength to return the handkerchief to its place, however, and lay there with it reposing in his hand like a small flag of surrender.
Where was his homburg? Instinct told him it was rolling around on another step, somewhere out of sight behind his head. But he was unable to turn around and see. A warmth was spreading outwards around the back of his head, and somewhere he could hear an occasional dripping sound. It was loud and intrusive, disturbing the perfect peace of the stairwell.
Otto noticed that his feet were resting on the steps of the flight above him with the tips of his faded leather brogues pointing upwards. He tried moving his toes, and saw the leather wrinkle and pucker as he did so. For some reason, although he was not sure why, this came as a relief to him. He was still unable to move his head – the warmth around it was making him drowsy. But he found that if he diverted his gaze to the left he could see the narrow window-slits, running up the wall. Through one of them he could make out a patch of blue sky with a cloud moving slowly across it.
Otto centred his eyes once more and lay staring at the radiating spokes above him. He was starting to feel a little cold, apart from his head – which seemed, if anything, to be getting warmer. The warmth seemed to be draining from the rest of his body, downwards into his skull. The toes, he noticed, were coldest of all.
‘Most peculiar,’ he said aloud and was startled to find that he could hardly hear his own voice. It came to him only indistinctly; muffled as though heard from the other side of a door. Yet the dripping sound behind him remained perfectly clear.
He decided that he should try to move his feet. They were starting to feel fuzzy now, as well as cold. The pins and needles were nipping at his toes. But he lacked the strength to lift them properly, or readjust the position of his body. He would have to try something else instead. With his heels, Otto pushed as hard as he could against the step on which they rested. His body started to shift backwards. As it did so, he realised that his head was hanging over the edge of the top step of the flight below. If he pushed any harder, he might propel himself down even further. Better just to lie where he was, then. Perhaps take a little nap while he waited for someone to come and help him move his feet.
Otto drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he opened his eyes he saw the tall yellow staircase, drawing him upwards through its coils.
‘Partly inspired by the lines of a seashell, and partly by the structure of DNA,’ he said aloud to himself at one point.
Some time later, in the silence of the stairwell, he felt a rhythmical vibration begin to tickle the back of his head. It was not the dripping sound – that had stopped altogether. This was a steadier rhythm, regular and solid, and the vibrations were getting louder with every beat. He heard a muffled noise, like an exclamation, at which point the vibrations became very fast indeed. The spiral staircase disappeared from view, replaced by a face that Otto recognised. It was the young man he had seen earlier that day, exercising on the forecourt of the building. What was the name on the back of his top again?
The face above him was filled with anxiety. He felt hands cradling his head and heard a voice speaking to him. But he couldn’t understand what was being said. The young man gently lowered his head back down, stood and ran swiftly up the stairs. He was wearing a different-coloured top this afternoon: blue this time, not red. No letters on the back like before.
The name, Otto wondered. What is his name?
He watched the head grow smaller as it circled the stairs up to the higher floors. The young man was ascending at a remarkable rate. He must have been taking three or four steps at a time.
Otto shut his eyes. He was starting to feel quite drowsy. Exceptionally drowsy, in fact. And there was a heaviness about it that was unfamiliar. This was no ordinary fatigue. It felt to him like the weight of many ages, pressing gently on his eyelids.
Moments later, a tiny head appeared in the distance – wheeling its way quickly down the stairs. Another followed immediately behind. The second was not moving as fast as the first, but it was travelling at a fair rate, nonetheless. The two heads made an interesting pattern as they wound their way to where he lay.
Geometry in motion, he wanted to say out loud, but the words would not come from his mouth.
The two bobbing heads continued their descent. Otto
now could make out the first. It belonged once more to the young man in hooded top and jogging pants.
The name. What is his name?
Otto also recognised the head of the person running behind. The bright-red hair, bouncing loose in plaited streams, was highly distinctive.
Roz, Otto tried and failed to say, as her face appeared suddenly above him.
Roz was saying something to him, as she looked him over with the calm professionalism of the nurse. Her movements were urgent but unhurried. After a brief examination, during which she appeared to be focusing on Otto’s neck, her hands gently lifted his head, while the young man (Mikey – that was it!) took his legs.
Once he had been moved around and placed down flat upon his back, Otto felt a little more comfortable. He wanted to thank them both but couldn’t, smiling at them weakly instead. They continued talking for a minute or two – beyond his line of vision. Roz reappeared briefly, looking carefully into his face as she spoke on a mobile phone. Then she was gone from sight once more.
Settling as best he could into a more comfortable position, Otto studied again the geometry of the staircase. The peeling metal banisters seemed to wheel away into infinity. And then, high above him, emerging from the darkened heights of the stairwell, he saw something tiny, falling. It was not descending at a steady velocity, but slowly, even cautiously, whirling its way downwards as though in imitation of the banisters’ distinctive rhythm. This tiny object, getting closer to Otto now, seemed almost as light as the currents of air in which it spun. There were moments when it blew off course, or lifted slightly upwards, caught within the draughts from the heating system. But sure enough, the downward motion would re-establish itself once more, as this delicate white object defied all attempts to halt its progress.
Dancing and circling, elegant in its descent, the long journey down from the heavens was reaching its end. Then high above it, Otto noticed, many similar objects were falling – hundreds, thousands of them – obscuring the upper reaches of the stairwell as they wheeled and tumbled to earth in silent chaos. The tiredness that had been encroaching on Otto enfolded him completely. Just before losing consciousness, the corners of his mouth twitched slightly and a peaceful smile spread across his upturned face. The snowflake had landed on his cheek.
