The Devil's Staircase (21 page)

He found himself driving to Queensway Terrace, which was a stupid thing to do – what was he thinking? But he didn’t know where else to go. He parked down the road from the Royal and the squat and watched the activity around the crime scene. He almost felt proud, looking on as swarms of detectives and forensic specialists scoured the site.

There was a bang. Was it coming from the boot? Jesus, surely not. This one was unbelievable. She just would not get the hint. Not like that dirty rat who’d given up the ghost still reasonably fresh, or Jeanie with her surfer’s chick shark tooth who
decided
to die early on. He hadn’t killed them, hadn’t needed to, they’d just stopped breathing after a while, bless.

It was coming from the boot.

‘Think!’ he said to himself. ‘What is wrong with you? Make a decision. Jesus Christ. All I need is a place to tidy up.’

He put the key in the ignition and turned it, but then seemed unable to remember what to do next. He pushed the brake instead of the clutch, put the gear in reverse instead of first. Held the key for so long the engine flooded. He was losing his mind. It was the stress, probably.

Was that his phone ringing?

The adults in the room had stood up slowly as Greg held the phone in silence. The children had stood up too, clinging onto the loose clothing of a nearby adult.

‘She’s awake!’ Greg yelled.

There was screaming and hugging and jumping about, eyes and mouths suddenly relaxed, muscles unknotted. Tears became happy tears.

Keys and boys’ trinkets were grabbed, cars gotten into, and one or two of Celia’s family may have laughed, for the first time in five weeks.

The drive was only five minutes, but it seemed to take hours. Getting the boys buckled in, turning the key, waiting for a red Fiat to turn right at Queensway, stopping at three sets of traffic lights.

Greg’s car was first to arrive. It zoomed into the underground car park, driving over a jack that someone had left lying in the middle of the concrete, and bumped back down to earth. He swerved into a space, undid his seatbelt, opened the back door, undid the boys’ seatbelts, shut the doors, and ran.

Who arrived first? Who was faster? The little boys, striding up the stairs to the second floor with their drawings and
Dr Who
cards? Greg, running behind them, laughing? The parents and the brother and sister-in-law, pressing the button on the lift too many times? It was hard to know, because they all remembered seeing the same thing at exactly the same time: a doctor whose tardy response to the news of Celia’s wakening may have saved his life, a confused nurse in the doorway of room 1 . . .

. . .and an empty bed.

After giving the telephone number to the hospital, I shivered. It was ice-cold, and the creaking-ship noise that I’d heard downstairs seemed to be getting louder. When I exhaled, the air in front of me fogged. I opened the double doors and grabbed one of the white towels I’d used earlier. I wrapped it around me and walked across to the stairs, and down towards the sauna. I had to get warm. But the closer I got to the sauna, the louder the creaking noise became, and I found myself acting like one of those idiots in the movies who go towards said terrifying noise, instead of running as fast as they can away from it.

It was coming from the cleaning cupboard downstairs. I got some keys out of the metal cupboard and tried a few before finding the right one. I pushed the door slowly, tip-toed into the small dark cupboard, walked past the
schmeissing
sticks, cleaning fluids and rat poisons, and stopped in front of a deafening boiler labelled ‘showers’. I switched the ‘off’ button and the creaking stopped. Thank God, I thought as I exhaled.

When I turned around, Hamish was standing in front of me.

I screamed, of course, not just once, but twice. An instantreaction-high-pitched scream, then an I’m-not-ready-to-stop-screaming-yet one.

After Hamish had calmed me down, he laughed and said he’d be asking me for the dry cleaning bill. It was such a relief seeing Hamish. He said and did all the right things.

‘Let’s have something to eat,’ he said, putting his arm around me and leading me back upstairs.

He had brought bread and peanut butter, my favourite, which he set out on the desk as I tried to get warm with three towels or so.

The guy was a nutcase, or so Hamish said, with a huge list of previous. He’d been deported, breached probation, failed to appear at court – and so on and so on.

‘Hamish, it’s not just Pete. There’s something I need to tell you.

‘What is it darlin’?’

‘The phone’s about to ring.’ I said, telling him who was going to ring and why.

He stopped spreading the peanut butter and held me tightly. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here.’

The phone felt like it had rung inside me. I gasped. After years of thinking about this moment, it had come. Our embrace froze. We moved away from each other, took a deep breath, then walked hand in hand towards the reception area. It was Dr Gibbons with the test results.

The wave of terror he unleashed pelted into me full blast. I let go of Hamish’s hand. He spoke for a while, longer than I thought he would, and I sat facing the back wall listening, just taking it all in. He was a kind man, always had been.

‘Are you there?’ he asked, because I hadn’t said anything for a while.

‘Um . . .’ I couldn’t answer the lovely doctor, because I wasn’t really sure if I
was
there, or anywhere. I stood up to check if I was, to look at myself in the mirror opposite reception, to touch my face and watch my reflection as some kind of proof that I was in this place, that I had just heard what I had heard. I turned around and faced the mirror. But it was too dark, I couldn’t see anything. I stared at the darkness for a moment, then said: ‘Yes, I’m here. I’m fine, thanks. No, I’m not alone. Yes, I will. Bye Doctor. Thanks,’ and hung up.

Then noises came from me that I didn’t know I could make. They weren’t happy ones. I had the Huntington’s gene. I was going to die a horrible death, like Mum had. I was going to get clumsy. Shit, I had already gotten clumsy. I had tripped over on the pavement, banged my head on the fridge. And this is what it would be like from now on. I would wonder if a paper cut meant it had started, if a forgotten phone number meant it had. And maybe it had, already. I was going to lose control of my body, make weird angry movements that scared people away. I was going to forget things and choke and die. I was never going to love someone properly, or have kids. When the time came, Ursula would be married or camping in Katherine Gorge. Dad would be old or dead and I’d die alone, with no one loving me, no one holding my hand. Please bring back the not knowing. Please bring back the not knowing.

I fell to my knees and banged my fists against the marble. I screamed and yelled and moaned and wriggled on the floor like a half-squished ant. ‘NO!’ I didn’t want to die. I wished I’d never phoned. I should never have phoned. Not knowing
was
better than knowing this terrible thing was in me, part of me, ahead of me. It was so fucking unfair! Why me? All the things people say, I said through my yells, meaning them as much as people always mean them. It’s so unfair. I was just eighteen. I’d had a shitty, pointless life so far, and it was only going to get even more shitty and more pointless. Why fucking me?

Hamish gathered me in his arms on the floor and held me as I screamed. I think I kept going for a long, long time, but eventually the yelling and crying became sobbing, shuddering, softer somehow.

I had cried in bed with Pete, but not enough to make up for the years I hadn’t, just enough to disturb the stones in my stomach a little. Now I could feel them rubbing and eroding and melting completely, balls of Maltesers in a hot steaming pot. I remembered the tone of Mum’s letter: she sounded happy, said she was lucky. She’d kissed my chubby cheeks.

I saw the letter on the bench at reception, made my way towards it and re-read it, touching the words with my fingers, taking in what Mum was trying to tell me – that it would be okay, that she was with me, that she loved me.

‘Learn to walk again,’ I read.

‘What?’ Hamish asked me. Poor Hamish. He’d been watching me grieve, unsure what to do, how to respond.

‘My Mum wrote this letter to me. She said finding out is like getting a new set of legs, and that I’ll learn to walk again. I didn’t know what she meant a few minutes ago.’

‘She means you should fight,’ Hamish said.

‘That’s it.’

She was right. I should fight. I should fight for the years I’d been given, for the friends I could make and the fun I could have and the risks I could take and the places I could go. For the love I could give.

My stomach began to feel like a stomach for the first time in ten years and not a sack of rocks. I listened to my heartbeat. It was loud and fast. Everything about me seemed poised. A surge of adrenaline was running through me. I hadn’t felt this in a while. My first expedition into life had been numbed by cannabis so I had still been anaesthetised. Despite declaring dramatically that I was going to
live,
all I’d done was run away. What had been the point to me? Employee of the Week? (Spectacularly disgraced.) Friend of the Year? (To kindred spirits who fucked off just as fast as they fucked on.) Root of the Century? (To a serial killer! Ha!) What about Saviour of the Universe? I hadn’t even heard Celia. I’d done nothing, made no imprint.

But now I knew I had fewer years to make one, something started to bubble as if my family’s life-ban from Luna Park had been lifted, and I had been given another all-day ticket. Now I wanted that ticket. I wanted to queue at the Scenic Railway, get in the first carriage beside Ursula, put my arms in the air, open my eyes wide and yell. I had just been given a day of limitless stomach-churning rides that would end, of course, but would leave a knowing smile on me because I had ridden them, Scenic Railway and all. Mum and Hamish were right, I had to fight. I
would
fight. I would start living properly, now I knew I was dying.

‘That’s the spirit,’ Hamish said, handing me a bag of clothes to change into.

‘Have a shower. I’ll go buy some wine and we’ll have a drink to the rest of your life.’

I took Hamish’s poly bag of clothes and walked downstairs. I needed to calm myself before ringing Ursula and Dad. Did they have to go through all of this again? And then there was the guilt they’d feel – Dad for loving a woman who gave this to me, Ursula for being the one who got away.

More tears came as I stood in the shower cubicle waiting for the water to heat up. I pressed my hands against the shower wall and waited. But the water didn’t heat up and I remembered that I’d turned off the showers in the cupboard. I wrapped a towel around myself and walked out to the cupboard, switching on the boiler again. I raced back to the shower, closed the door and hung up my towel. After a few seconds, I stood under the hot water and washed my hair, scrubbed my legs, arms and torso, cleaned everywhere, rubbing the badness of everything away – Pete and the squat, that poor woman, me . . .

I’d only remembered bad things about Mum for years, had only ever thought of her as an ill person and the cause of my unhappiness, but now bunches of images came back to me. Of making fairy cakes in the kitchen and accidentally getting cream all over Mum’s green jumper. Of throwing up at my seventh birthday party and proclaiming: ‘The jelly must be off!’ when I’d eaten twenty-three sausage rolls, twelve violet crumbles and half an elephant-shaped ice-cream cake beforehand. Of the two of us watching
Anne of Green Gables
with the curtains shut, spooned together on the huge leather sofa. Of getting a celebratory lunch at the Red Lion when, aged nine, I’d won Best and Fairest in the St Patrick’s netball team. Of spending the day at Mum’s work – she was a GP – and announcing carefully that ‘Jane Beaumont is here for her 11 o’clock, Dr Kelly.’ Of reading
Ping
and
Seven Little Australians
and
The Magic Faraway Tree.
Of singing: ‘Little Lucy Locket, She’s got an empty socket, She’ll keep an eye open for ya!’