The Devil's Staircase (10 page)

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.

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.

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.

That’s where it ended, the plan, and it had gone perfectly well at first, but after that, he’d had to make it up as he went along.

She woke up earlier than he expected, but he was ready. He was wearing his chosen face – a gimp mask – jeans and an old T-shirt. His mouth seemed to gleam through the custom-made holes in the taut, shiny black leather. Big eyes stared at her. Huge eyes, opposite her, in the corner of the room. Gagged and tied to her chair, she woke. He watched her face as the fear swept over it. Her eyes wide and white. Her forehead deeply lined from the pressure of silent yells. Her mouth dribbling. Legs red-raw with wriggling, rubbing, trying, begging.