The Devil's Staircase

by Helen FitzGerald

  Francesco was waiting at the wine bar. He was wearing jeans and a striped jumper and was sipping a glass of red wine. He looked different outside the hostel – less attractive somehow, but after Bronny drank two pints of Fosters he got better-looking again. They apologised to each other, and Bronny told him about the noises.

  ‘You’re from Hicksville,’ he said, ‘Probably just getting used to the big smoke . . . That, or you need to stop smoking ganja.’

  They went back to the squat after closing. The others were in the living room watching a repeat of Eu rot rash and laughing very hard while taking turns with the bucket bong.

  Bronny sat on a mattress beside Francesco and felt his knee touch hers. She found it hard to breathe when he held her hand, even harder when he touched her lower back and rubbed it slightly. Images flooded her. This was going to be it. Could it be happening, really?

  He swooped in without any warning at all, like a Kilburn magpie, just suddenly there, pecking. She was taken aback, and found the feeling of his mouth rather odd – were those his teeth? Where did his lips begin and end? She forgot everything Fliss had taught her about how to prevent sloppy-kiss-rash and how to discourage lizard-tongue without giving offence, and began what she had practised on the hand basin next to her Kilburn toilet. Face at 10 or 2 o’clock; mouth half-open; tongue relaxed, wet and wide; tongue movements slow, gentle and irregular; nose-breathing soft or not at all.

  But it was hard to focus and at one point she wondered if she had bitten him as his hand reached for a private place. In the end she was so desperate for air that she pushed him away and laughed, looking around the room at the people who were still there. She giggled nervously, expecting him to suggest they go somewhere else, but he didn’t. He pecked her on the lips again then went for the full magpie swoop. Bronny kept her eyes open this time, watching as four people flicked between her first kiss and Channel Four.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Pete said a little curtly from the sofa opposite Bronny and Francesco. Bronny abandoned the kiss, gulped some overdue air and watched as Pete walked out of the room.

  ‘I’d better be off too,’ Francesco said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  And Francesco left, just like that: without taking his grey and white striped jumper, or Bronny’s virginity.

  10

  Oh shit, the darkness. It was lying on me. I sat up when I felt its heaviness on my chest, took some deep breaths, and then went to the bathroom for a glass of water.

  When I turned off the tap, it began to shake – huge tremors, deafening thumps. I raced from the bathroom into the hall and upstairs into Fliss’s room where, to my horror, she was having the sex that I was supposed to be having. It was Zach lying underneath her, not strumming his guitar, but something else that made Fliss say pussycatpussycat over and over. They didn’t hear me or see me, so I ran to Cheryl-Anne’s room on the second floor. We linked arms, both of us half-dressed and terrified, and tiptoed down to the first floor. We stopped and listened in the hallway, but the noise had gone.

  I must be going mad, I decided. I’d taken a lot of drugs in the last few days, and had little sleep. I’d changed my diet, my routine, my everything. Maybe I was hallucinating.

  When Pete’s door creaked open in front of us, Cheryl-Anne and I jumped and screamed.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked in his usual monotone.

  ‘Did you hear the noises?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, then checked out the first floor and ground floor as we crept behind him.

  ‘Try that door,’ I said, pointing to the door in the hall.

  He went up to his room, came back down with some kind of tool kit, and fiddled with the lock. After about five minutes – during which time there were no scary noises whatsoever – he smiled at us, raised his eyebrows, and opened the door.

  It was a cupboard. A boring cupboard with old rolls of wallpaper, cans of rusty paint piled high, an old record player and some records.

  ‘You’re going a bit nuts,’ Cheryl-Anne said.

  After giving the house the all-clear, Pete made us a cup of tea, and sat with us in the kitchen till we were giggling happily.

  ‘You need to stop taking that shit.’

  He was right, the dope was obviously messing with my head. He went off to his room, leaving us to drink our tea.

  ‘What I would do to lick those quads!’ Cheryl-Anne said after he’d gone.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He is gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Enigmatic.’

  Hmm.

  I almost kept the darkness away that night in bed. Almost ignored the feeling of sinking, of weighing a ton and being too tired to sleep, too sad to cry. Almost. But the screeching noise started. It felt as though the noise was inside my head. I put my hands over my ears. I put my makeshift pillow over my head. I scrunched my eyes, hummed, then tried to think about nice things: Francesco . . . (teeth, didn’t quite work) . . . Chocolate . . . (seemed to have ants crawling around in it) . . . Ursula . . . Ah, that worked . . . Dad . . . Oh . . . My Dad, my Ursula. I would write to them tomorrow, tell them I loved them.

  I felt a little calmer, removed my pillow from my head and tiptoed to the window. I opened the old curtain and peered into the darkness, unable to see anything. I relaxed a little, and then a grey tabby cat bounced up at my window and meowed an on-heat meow, a terrifying baby squeal. I jumped backwards and held my racing heart until my breathing slowed down. It was just a cat. The screeching noises were coming from a little grey cat. Thank God!

  I wasn’t calm enough to sleep, so I went back into the hall and opened the cupboard door. It was cold in there. It gave me a shiver. I picked up the old record player and a couple of Beatles records and took everything into my room. Dad used music to relax. He’d set his stereo up in the shed and play classical music very loudly till he felt better. Mozart had floated over our garden for a long time after Mum died.

  I set the player up under the window and switched it on. I blew the dust off a record, placed the needle on the vinyl and lay back on my mattress. It crackled away cheerfully, and when the song ended, I put it on again.

  I picked up the needle and played it a third time, then a fourth, and during the last repeat, the needle jumped: at the please help part, bouncing back down to repeat the words.

  It had jumped high off the vinyl, a centimetre or so, then played through to the end of the song. Or had it? Pete was right, I needed to stop smoking skunk.

  11

  Pete craved space. The closest he could find was Kensington Gardens at the top of the street. After he finished work at the gym, he walked along Queensway, past Whiteley’s shopping centre and the cafés and pubs, into the parallel Queensway Terrace, past the Royal and the squat and up to the end of the street. He crossed the busy road and entered the gardens. He noticed Bronny almost immediately, reading a Lonely Planet guide in the shade. He thought better of going over to her. She’d made it pretty clear how she felt about him. Instead, he walked past cricketers and sunbathers, past the pond and statues, and into Hyde Park.

  It wasn’t space as he knew it, but it was something. He found a reasonably empty piece of grass and lay down on it. He closed his eyes and imagined himself at home. He thought back to the time he’d been driving along Eyre Highway, the 1,668-kilometre stretch of straight treeless road that cuts its way along the Nullarbor Plain. He’d been sitting on the roof of a Jag, sunroof open, feet on the steering wheel, brick on the accelerator. The land around him was yellow, empty and endless, just as he liked it. He wasn’t one for all those English trees and hedges that emptied the desperate reservoirs. He liked it dry. He’d had his sunglasses on and his arms outstretched to embrace the land. He’d breathed it in. His beloved and beautiful Australia.

  Pete inhaled as he lay on the English grass, trying to smell home: eucalyptus and dust. He tried to hear home: kookaburras and parrots, to feel home, happy.

  ‘I want to ask you a favour.’

/>   The Australian accent felt like part of his daydream. Low and smooth and drinkable. He made an ‘Mmm’ noise, then opened his eyes and realised the voice was real. He sat up.

  ‘Stop jumping out at me.’ Bronny was standing over him, her book in hand.

  ‘Have I been jumping?’

  ‘Yes. In private places.’

  ‘You make noises . . . screaming or something. You wander around at night.’

  ‘You mean I talk in my sleep?’

  Pete mimicked a high-pitched, distressed voice: ‘I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying . . .’

  ‘No! Really?’

  ‘Wait for me Ursula, Dad! You’re so smal!’

  Bronny hadn’t really spoken to anyone since she arrived, not properly. Conversations had been about hash, mostly, and sometimes hair removal. She was aching to talk. It surprised her that this large elusive man was the one she wanted to talk to. She sat down beside him on the grass.

  ‘That’s my nightmare.’

  ‘What is it you’re trying to do?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Get home. But I end up running too fast and kind of bounding too high. I end up getting further and further away.’ Pete smiled at her. He understood.

  ‘I miss Cheesles,’ Bronny said.

  ‘The beach,’ Pete said.

  ‘Trams.’

  ‘People who say hello.’

  ‘Chocolate teddy bear biscuits.’

  ‘Is Ursula your sister?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Yeah, she’s twenty-two. She’s the double of Dad.’

  ‘Is she the one in the photo in your room?’

  ‘When did you see that?’

  ‘That time I came in to see what all the noise was . . . She looks like you,’ Pete said.

  ‘She’s the lucky one. Got the gorgeous hair and the brains and the legs that go on.’

  ‘She’s just like you.’

  ‘No, I’m the double of Mum.’

  Bronny didn’t tell Pete that her Mum had died eight years earlier. She didn’t describe her most vivid memory – the choking sound, running into the bedroom, her Mum yelling at a ten year-old stranger at the end of the bed: ‘Who’s that? Get her out of here!’ She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t cried when she died, or at the funeral, or when she visited the cemetery, or ever since. She’d taken the tears and rolled them into tiny balls of stone. She could feel them sometimes, tiny hard balls of stone in her stomach.

  ‘She must be very beautiful,’ Pete said.

  ‘Mmm.’ Before it all got horrible, her Mum was beautiful.

  Bronny did tell Pete other things, though. She told him about the bacon factory where she’d buy cheap rashers once a week, ignoring the yards filled with sad-looking pigs outside the building and the boiling cauldrons of them inside.

  She told him about the day she went to Luna Park in St Kilda. Ursula had been begging to go for years, and their Dad finally took them and bought them an all-day pass.

  ‘I was fifteen,’ Bronny said, going on to tell him that not only had she argued the whole way in the car – ‘I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!’ – but she’d also refused to go on any of the rides.

  ‘I sat underneath that huge mouth with my arms crossed,’ Bronny said.

  When her Dad came out for the twentieth time, begging her to cheer up and try and have some fun, she agreed to have a snow-ice cone. As the woman poured blue liquid onto the ice, Bronny noticed Ursula lining up to go on the famous Scenic Railway roller-coaster. She ran to the queue to stop her, but by the time she got there Ursula had gotten in the front carriage. Bronny jumped the barrier, screamed for her to get off, because people die on these rides! They get stuck upside down and die! She yanked at Ursula’s collar while the attendants rang security.

  ‘We were banned for life,’ Bronny told Pete, ‘Ursula didn’t speak to me for three weeks.’

  Bronny told him about scraping by at school and working as a filing clerk at the Mint. She could tell he was wondering why she was such a low achiever compared to the rest of the family and offered her excuses before he asked.

  ‘I never saw the point in going to uni. Why bother?’ she said.

  She told him about how homeless Mr Todd always seemed happy. Caked in the dirt he’d slept in for years, he seemed as much a part of the landscape as the old bluestone jail Ned Kelly’s father had reportedly escaped from.

  ‘What happened to Mr Todd?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Some do-gooder got hold of him and put him into sheltered housing. They gave him a bath, washed the dirt off, and he died.’ ‘Just like that?’

  ‘I think it held him together, the dirt.’

  ‘I want to show you something.’ Pete pulled her from the ground. They walked to the other side of the park, crossed a road or two, strolled past shops and cafés and then houses and small gardens. Pete stopped when they arrived in a back lane behind a row of huge white town-houses.

  ‘Smell,’ he said.

  Bronny closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. ‘Eucalyptus.’

  ‘I reckon some homesick Aussies like us planted it.’ Pete pointed to the huge eucalyptus tree in the back garden. Some of the branches overhung the lane. He reached up to one and pulled some leaves from the tree.

  ‘One day I want one of these in my garden,’ he said, placing the leaves in Bronny’s hand.

  They walked for a long time that day. First to a garden centre, where Pete bought Bronny a small eucalyptus tree – about a foot high.

  ‘Which pot?’ Pete asked her.

  ‘Yellow.’

  Pete carried the tiny tree in its sunny yellow pot through London, stopping en route to show her something else that interested him.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bucks Row. PC John Neil found a woman lying on her back right here, her clothes were pulled up, blood was oozing from her throat . . .’

  ‘Ook!’

  Pete put the pot down and spoke excitedly.

  ‘The first proper serial killer. At least the first one people read about, followed, like a celebrity. Jack the Ripper. Five women, they reckon, mutilated . . . some had their organs ripped out.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Pete put one hand on Bronny’s throat and the other around her waist, acting the story as he relayed it.

  ‘He grabbed them, lowered them carefully to the ground, then slit their throats.’

  Bronny was looking up into Pete’s eyes as he held her arched back. If this was a dancing situation, it would have been quite romantic.

  ‘Then he kept a bit, like a kidney!’ Pete said.

  ‘Shut up!’ Bronny managed to get upright, then she ran away. Pete picked up the pot and ran after her, giggling.

  When they got back to the park, they lay on the grass. One of them lay down first. If you’d asked them later neither would remember which one it was, but they lay down on the grass and shared the same view of the same sky, silent and comfortable. When Bronny woke to the noises of the evening, Pete was still in the same position.

  ‘I’ve just officially slept with a man for the first time,’ Bronny said, stretching.

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘I take it you’ve fucked a guy, though?’

  Bronny hit him in the stomach and he doubled up, first in pain, and then in laughter. They walked back to the squat together without talking. Some chemicals had unexpectedly arrived on the scene, which meant they were silent, but no longer comfortable.

  12

  I was going to be late for my second official date with Francesco. I wasn’t so sure about him for some reason – well, I knew the reason. It was Pete. He was nicer than I’d thought, and I’d just spent the most wonderful day with him. But he was a bit weird, especially all that serial killer stuff. However, I needed to see Francesco again because I was still a virgin and in sexual lesson number two Fliss had said that under no circumstances should I relinquish my flower to someone I have strong feelings
for.

  ‘You need to be in control,’ she’d told me. ‘Total control.’ ‘Are you really into Francesco?’ Pete asked me as we walked down Queensway Terrace. I smiled.

  ‘Yeah, well kind of. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, he’s not the serious type, y’know.’

  ‘I’ve spent far too long being serious.’

  We were about to cross the road to the squat when I saw two little boys sitting on the step of their main door flat. One of them was about seven years old. The other about five. They still had their school uniforms on and they were staring ahead, their hands holding up their heads. Just staring, cute as buttons, but sad. The youngest had curly blonde hair that had probably never been cut and a Band-Aid on his knee. His bottom lip curled outwards to emphasise his grumpiness. The older one had short dark hair and a serious face.

  ‘Hey you guys!’ I said, before crossing the road.

  ‘We’re not allowed to talk to strangers,’ the curly little one said.

  ‘I’m Bronwyn. I live over there . . . So I’m not a stranger.’ ‘Strangers are people you wouldn’t let hold your ultra rare cards and I wouldn’t give you any of mine. I’ve got five.’ ‘Four,’ the older one said, rolling his eyes.

  ‘Dr Who,’ a man said, appearing from the front door behind the boys. ‘He’s obsessed.’ The man patted the older boy on the head. ‘Any sign?’

  The boy shook his head sadly. ‘He’s not coming.’

  ‘He will, he always does, eventually . . .’

  The man put me in the picture: ‘Bobby, our cat, he’s a gallivanter.’

  I surmised that Greg was their Dad. He was slim and gorgeous, but also a little sad looking. As we did introductions, I noticed that Pete had crossed the road and gone inside the squat.

  I turned to the youngest boy again. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you and if ever you feel confident enough I would love to see one of your ultra rare cards, from a distance obviously. No holding.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ the curly-haired boy said. The older one stood up excitedly; the cat had suddenly emerged from behind me. It was the same cat that had jumped at my bedroom window. It meowed innocently.