The Devil's Staircase

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘Oh hello,’ I said before heading home. ‘He was in my garden last night!’

  As I shut my front door, I looked back to the flat across the road. The boys and their Dad were holding the cat, but still sitting on the step, staring sadly.

  After getting ready for my date, I looked out my bedroom window and saw that Pete had put the yellow pot with the tiny tree in the garden. It made me smile. He was cooking Thai chicken curry when I went into the kitchen later. I had, once again, prepared myself for a night of lust, and had one of Fliss’s ridiculously revealing tops on.

  ‘Hello mister,’ I said, opening the back door and checking my little piece of Oz. ‘Thanks for watering it.’

  I tasted the green curry, which was very good indeed. It had basil and coconut cream.

  ‘Yum,’ I said. ‘Can you save me some?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I raised my eyebrows with a ‘never-you-mind’ and waltzed out of the kitchen.

  It seemed pretty obvious after the second date with Francesco that I would never lose my bloody virginity. I felt like Batman with his ticking bomb, running around trying to get rid of it, but finding nowhere to put it. Over dinner, I picked at food as Francesco yacked on about some restaurant in Scotland where you could choose your oysters from the loch. I couldn’t listen. It was boring, and I had only one thing on my mind, a mission.

  I hadn’t had a mission in a while. Like when I was nine and St Patrick’s were to play the Broadford Minis in the grand final. I was centre, a furious little runner, and I’d never wanted anything so desperately in my life. I drew diagrams on a flipchart Dad brought home from work, deciding which moves would disarm my opponent, Kylie Dalkeith, and which throws would clear the tall defender who’d just moved south from Puckapunyal. I practised dodging in the garden. I ran to school and back each day to keep fit, and prayed. Please God, let us beat the Broadford Minis!

  We lost. 23–21. I cried right up till the night I won Best and Fairest.

  Since giving up netball at fourteen, my obsession with it had struck me as alien and pathetic. But here I was, obsessed again: with scoring a no-strong-feelings sexual encounter.

  ‘I just think we should take it slowly,’ Francesco had said after another boring dinner that he’d paid for. ‘I like you too much.’

  I’d had three pints of lager, all of which seemed to have gone to my thighs as much as my head, and felt rather stroppy. I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it that night.

  ‘Screw “slowly”. Just take your trousers off.’ I was actually pulling at his zip in his hostel room and he was stopping me with his hand. What the hell was wrong with him?

  ‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow, over dinner. I’ve got indigestion.’

  He pushed my hand away and opened his bedroom door for me to leave.

  ‘I don’t want dinner, I want sex!’ I yelled. The door was wide open and Hamish, my computer friend, was standing in the foyer. He winced.

  ‘Bronny! Wait!’ Hamish said, following me out of the hostel.

  ‘What is wrong with me?’ I asked him. He sat down with me on the front step.

  ‘Nothing. You’re perfect. He’s actually being very decent.’

  ‘Who wants decent?’

  ‘You do, believe me. And there’s plenty of time for all of that. No hurry. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘I’m scared I’ll never lose it.’

  ‘You need to lighten up.’

  I took Hamish’s excellent advice. We went to the squat, smoked two bucket bongs and ate at least seven white bread, real butter and crunchy peanut butter sandwiches. Hamish and I had finished the loaf when Pete came into the kitchen. He looked unwell.

  ‘Did you save me some?’ I asked him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Green curry.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Lucky escape, I reckon. You look a bit peaky.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, walking out with his glass of water.

  I had a bonkers idea after Hamish left. It came to me as I stared at the living room wall: wouldn’t it be fun and – yay – necessary – to tiptoe up the stairs, open Pete’s bedroom door and yell ‘BOO!’

  He was lying stark naked on his mattress. He made no attempt to cover himself up, and I made no attempt to stop staring – at his face, at his torso, and then at his bits. I’d never seen bits in real life, and – in Pete’s case – lots would have been a more apt description. When I finally looked up towards Pete’s upper half again, he stretched his hand towards me and held it there. There was a peanut stuck in my molar. I picked it out with my tongue, then turned, walked out the door, and shut it firmly. I stood against his door in the hall, breathless, and a little numb.

  ‘Ow!’ Pete had opened the door while I was still leaning on it. I fell backwards into his arms. As I righted myself and turned around, I was relieved to see that he had put on his shorts.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Mmm, fine,’ I gulped, finally prising my hands from his inked biceps.

  I was suddenly awkward around this guy. Not like with Francesco, who, to be honest, probably bored me into relaxation. During our sexless dinner dates, Francesco had only ever talked about food. He was a rich boy, I realised, happy to eat out most nights, unlike his skint fellow travellers who lived on pot noodles, toast and peanut butter, and pasta and pesto. His parents had slaved away in the restaurant business and left him with a love of everything culinary.

  ‘My family are from Umbria,’ he’d explained during our last date. And before he’d even ordered a starter he’d decided: ‘For breakfast tomorrow I’m going to have poached eggs!’

  So with Francesco there was indigestion rather than sexual tension.

  Not so with Pete.

  Escorting me into the living room to ‘chat’, Pete fluffed the sofa cushion for me. He then sat beside me and I wished he hadn’t because it was altogether too close. The sofa was old and soft and we both sank into the middle and touched each other from the leg all the way up to the shoulder. I stretched my torso in the other direction. I did the buttock-lift. But it didn’t work. He was too heavy, the sofa was too squidgy, and the torso and buttock refused to be diverted from their touching positions. To make things worse, I had turned my neck at right angles to listen to his ‘chat’ and it had locked. If I moved my head, I pondered, as I breathed carefully through my nose, it might just fall off. So I didn’t move it. Instead I said yeah a lot while he told me about some flat town near Adelaide, which he loved, and which I thought sounded bloody awful.

  When Pete finally said goodnight, I managed to remain upright on the sofa until he disappeared, and then fell down sideways, my neck still ninety degrees from where it should be.

  There were no noises that night. I had the first decent sleep since I’d moved in. The next day, I arrived for my shift at work, watered the bamboo palm as usual – I seemed to be the only person who ever did – and wrote another letter to Ursula.

  Dear Ursula,

  I’m sitting at a desk in the Porchester Steam rooms, which is where I work forty hours a week. I hand people towels and clean the hair out of drains. There are naked women everywhere.

  Have you decided to forgive me? Do you understand? I can’t – won’t – talk about you-know-what, but I’m not hiding from you or Dad anymore. I’m just trying to have some fun, and it’s kind of working except for the naked women everywhere.

  God . . . Kate and Esther are talking about me from the chairs across the way. They can’t stand me, the old bags. I was made Employee of the Week by the knob-head manager, and they are so jealous. Kate, the flabby white thing has boobs that reach the floor when she sweeps it. And Esther, she’s an arse-licker and I hate her.

  I’ve met a boy. His name’s Francesco. He manages the hostel next door to my house and likes eating out. There are so many Aussies here – there’s one guy called Pete, but I’m not sure what I think of him yet. (He’s the one in the photo.) And my new best friends – Hamish and
Fliss – who I can’t imagine life without.

  One day maybe you could come over? I know you hate rain, but sometimes it stops, and you should have some fun, Urs, you should fall in love. I wish you would. More than anything, I’d love to see someone adore you. I wish you would come over. As long as you promise not to talk about you-know-what.

  I love you Urs. I miss . . .

  ‘Can you butter the outside of the toast as well?’ A woman was asking me to make her a toasted cheese sandwich. She was about eight stone, 40, and her botox made her look like an escapee from Madame Tussauds. Whenever I saw her, I winced a little. Scary.

  I quickly folded the letter and put it under the desk and went out the double doors to the kitchen. As I chopped the toast in half, I overheard Pete talking to the girl sitting in the small wooden reception booth by the entrance to the steam rooms.

  ‘Why don’t you come along?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m really not into musicals,’ he said.

  I popped my head out to see who was chatting him up. It was a receptionist who was older than me and exceptionally pretty. She was English, one of the few locals at the Porchester, and she had never spoken to me. Come to think of it, I’d never spoken to her either. What would I say? ‘What did you do on the weekend?’ ‘Where are you going this summer?’ ‘How’s your Dad?’ It was terrible, looking back, but I had no interest whatsoever in normality. I was interested in drinking, smoking, losing the unlosable and in that huge muscular guy standing by the plant at reception.

  Was I?

  I could see the girl’s reflection in the huge mirror opposite the reception booth. I felt slightly odd about her talking to him like that. How dare she?

  ‘I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,’ I said when Pete spotted me peering out from the kitchen.

  ‘I should have threatened to ring the police, then slapped you across the face.’

  ‘What?’ This was from the pretty receptionist, quite rightly taken aback by our conversation.

  ‘We just live in the same house.’ Pete informed his adoring fan.

  ‘I see you’ve revived our Aussie native,’ Pete said, feeling the wet soil in the pot of the bamboo palm.

  ‘Green fingers,’ I said. He smiled and looked at me for too long.

  I jumped back inside the kitchen and hit my forehead with my palm. Green fingers . . .What a stupid fucking idiot. I peeked out of the kitchen again and watched Pete exit the corner door.

  I opened the double doors that led back into the relaxation area. The woman who’d asked for the toasted sandwich wasn’t just unhappy about the burnt toast. She was unhappy about the rumours.

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked me when I returned with a second attempt. Someone had told her the steam rooms were closing – too expensive, too old fashioned, not enough customers.

  ‘Kate, are we closing?’ I checked with the naked mopper.

  Her face went white. She rushed to Esther, whose face went similarly white. They’d never worked anywhere else, would never get or manage to hold down a job anywhere else, and both took turns running through the internal door to the swimming pool and gym area to find out if there was any truth to the rumour. There was. The steam rooms were closing soon. Management would do their best to find positions for us in the pool or gym, but things looked pretty grim for the old birds whose skills were limited to the harassment of fresh staff.

  I spent the rest of my shift pretending to clean the saunas and steam rooms downstairs. The rooms were in the bowels of the building. You had to walk down the stairs by the plunge pool, past the body-scrub room and the showers then turn the corner before you found them. I sat in one of the small wooden rooms for ages, feeling the badness dripping off my body as I poured water onto the sizzling coals.

  After everyone else had gone home, I locked up the steam rooms and pinned the keys I had been entrusted with since my elevation to Employee of the Week to the inside pocket of my polo shirt.

  When I got home, the desperate-measure seduction plans I’d made for the evening fell to pieces. Firstly, I had nothing to wear. Fliss had reclaimed much of the gear I’d scavenged since arriving, and all that remained in my room were my grotty jeans and my singlet, and two runners, one of which wasn’t mine, and which – on closer inspection – seemed to have a blood stain on it. Secondly, I smelt. No matter how many times I washed, the smell of the squat, particularly my room, seemed to seep into my skin. Thirdly, I hadn’t had time to do my nails, and Fliss had stressed that jaggy, unmanicured nails were a sure sign of unpruned bush syndrome, which was apparently enough to put any bloke off. Fourthly, I was starting to realise that having sex with Francesco might be as unappealing as having dinner with him and that there was every chance that he would yell: ‘Medium-rare!’ when he was ready to be served. And lastly, when I put the runner back down on the floor, I fell over.

  I hadn’t fainted, just fallen, and this wasn’t the first time I’d been a klutz recently: I’d tripped over a non-existent crack in the pavement on the way to work that morning. Now I lay on the floorboards, astonished at my clumsiness. And as I stared at the ceiling, I felt oddly warm, as if I was back in the steam room. I thought I was going insane, but then I smelt smoke. I sniffed at the air, sat up and sniffed, stood up and sniffed, but it seemed to disappear. I knelt down on the floorboards and put my nose to the floor. Definitely smoke. I placed my hand on the floorboards. Definitely warm. I lay down on my stomach and pressed my nose into the crack between the floorboards.

  There was smoke coming from the basement.

  PART TWO

  13

  Six feet below, a woman was tied to a chair. The yellow polyester that firmly gagged her mouth was on fire. The woman was Celia. She was thirty-eight and had two children. She’d been in the basement for four weeks.

  On the morning she was taken, Celia had finished her single weekly shift, an all-nighter at the hospice off Ladbroke Grove, changed into her power-walking gear, strapped her backpack tight around her back, stopped off at the garage for Walker’s salt and vinegar crisps and the latest Dr Who magazine, which she’d added to her backpack, and then walked fast for two miles till she reached her street. She’d smiled, excited that she would see the faces of her little boys any moment, that she would climb into the king-size bed the four of them inevitably ended up in and cuddle for at least an hour before the breakfast and school-lunch rush. She was looking forward to waving off the husband she still adored, walking the boys to school, having a second cup of coffee, and then snuggling in bed in front of last night’s episode of The Bill.

  As she passed by the Royal she marvelled at the street she lived in. She and Greg hadn’t given in to the suburban pull. They loved the busy, bustling youth of the city, and they never wanted to leave. She often thought such happy thoughts, saying thank you for the luck: for the happy childhood, the well-adjusted sibling, the healthy helpful parents, the job that means something, the husband that still thinks you’re the most beautiful woman in the world and regularly tells you so, the groovy flat, the cuddly cat, the children who make you smile and laugh all day, every day.

  But Celia didn’t get to walk into her flat, or lie in bed with Sam and Johnny, or drink the coffee that Greg would bring in to her at 8 a.m., or make toast and Nutella for breakfast then tuna sandwiches for lunch, or wave goodbye to Greg, or smile and laugh as she walked to school, or watch last night’s episode of The Bill.

  Instead she lost her shoe, and as the flame from her polyester gag began to lick her cheek and catch her hair, she really wished she hadn’t.

  14

  The Sick Man felt very sick. This time it seemed to be concentrated in the stomach area: sharp, stabbing pains. Initially he’d thought of his appendix, forgetting for a second that it had been removed two years earlier. He wondered about his heart, but there were no tingles. He googled several other options, even rang NHS Direct, and was left with the realisation that it must be psychosomatic, a result of the mistake he’d made.

>   It was a rather big mistake, taking a girl who belonged. He thought it would be a relief, but recently, no matter how many ways he did it, he still felt oddly unfulfilled, and was now starting to feel sick into the bargain.

  He thought back to when he was ill as a boy. He’d been in bed for five days. Five days alone in the house while his Mum was out somewhere, of sweating and crying and feeling like he wanted to die. On the fifth day he began to feel better, and some time in the afternoon he found himself masturbating. Just as he climaxed he looked out of the window and there she was. A young woman, jogging on the pavement outside his room.

  She came to him each time for years, this woman, jogging past him as he pulled, sometimes all of her, sometimes just her face, sometimes only a short white sports sock.

  But after a few years she faded, and he had to get help to find her again. In the park maybe? The sports shop? Sluttysporty.com? Images of trim healthiness returned at each window-shopping expedition and he lay in bed feeling better momentarily, just as he had when she’d jogged outside his twelve-year-old self’s bedroom window.

  It was after he moved to London he realised the window-shopping had stopped working; like a relationship gone stale, it was no longer enough. After weeks of failed attempts to climax he decided he would need to do more than browse. He would need to make a purchase.

  He knew her, had even smiled at her a couple of times. Knew where she lived, what she liked for lunch, that on Tuesday mornings she got home at around 5.15 a.m.

  He’d watched her do the same thing for two Tuesdays in a row, and had tried the old way many times, the battered curtain his mask, but he could never quite get there, so on the third Tuesday he implemented the plan he had rehearsed: At 5.15 a.m. the girl would walk, smiling, down the hill and past the hostel. She would bleed a little after the blow to the back of the head. She would be none the wiser as he dragged her from the pavement and into the abandoned house. None the wiser as he carried her through the abandoned hall, down the staircase into the basement.