Trap Door

by Dreda Say Mitchell

  But you need this job, Rachel. It’s a necessity, not an option.

  What do I do? Go down and under? Bolt away? I make myself look at Keats’s back, who’s unaware of all the dramarama behind him. Make sure he doesn’t see what I do next. I tap the pad of a finger just above my right eye. Yeah, I know, looks crazy but it isn’t. I’m stimulating a pressure point that helps to calm me. Because you see, I need to be calm. I’m going down. And under.

  Keats heads into a yellowy gloom, down a long narrow staircase, hemmed in by twin walls of naked chipped centuries-old bricks that have a disjointed relationship to each other like overlapping mismatched discoloured teeth. I can do this. I’ve got to do this.

  With a final tap and a prayer, I follow. Instinctively search out the light.

  There it is. A naked muted-coloured light bulb, dusty, fixed to the wall. Focusing on the light is like focusing on air, a sensation of lean fresh oxygen coming through. My gut sucks and pushes air in a more regular motion.

  I begin my descent. No polish on these stairs. Scuffed and scarred is their pattern, from the footwear of the living and those that are long dead. A tired rusty handrail to guide me, carefully I place my black flats on stairs that were created for smaller feet than mine. It’s a break-my-neck steep fall if I lose my footing.

  Every cell in my body rebels with each step. My stomach threatens to splash its contents over the walls. The bones in my knees tremble. The coldest sweat breaks, running into my eyes. My parched throat spasms, begging for water. It’s barely twenty steps down but this journey feels like a martyrdom.

  Keep going. Keep going. Keep…

  Finally – praise be if I was a churchgoer – I reach the bottom. Teeny tiny balls of trapped dust drift in the air like drunken fairies. I cough lightly behind my hand. It’s then I figure out we’re in a corridor, a tunnel that would fit in a coal mine. Coal mine, coal mine, my mind hysterically grinds. Down and under. Deep in the earth.

  The horror storms back. My senses become heightened, go into overdrive. I start smelling things that aren’t really there. The foul aroma of death lunging up through the ground shackling about my ankles, twinning up my legs. The damp decay riddled in the age-old walls sticking and choking to the flesh inside my throat. Hearing things that aren’t really there. Icy-cold water drip… drip… drip to the synced beat of my troubled heart. Start seeing things that aren’t really there. The way ahead a wonky narrowing tube of darkness that leads nowhere. The lumps and bumps of the bricks growing, slimy tumours that threaten to engulf me on both sides.

  What horrifies, claws at me, most of all are the screams. Of the twenty-two dead sweatshop workers. Terrifying. Deafening. Joining together until they’re the raucous squealing noise of the wheels of a train, its death journey a head-on collusion coming straight for me.

  My fingertip rushes above my eye. Tap. Tap. Tap. This isn’t real. It’s all in your head. My feverish gaze latches on to the weak light of yellow lamps fixed to the ceiling.

  Air. Air. Air. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  Keats’s stride is confident – he’s done this walk many times before. I haven’t. I continue to follow, breathe easier as I see there’s a portal of escape waiting ahead – a steel door. I nearly lose my footing when I barrel into a large object. Instinctively, my palm touches the wall for support and I wish it hadn’t; the overpowering wet chill from the bricks worms into my body. I snatch my hand away and gaze at what I’ve hit. A series of barrels stacked against the wall. Barrelled into barrels. Yeah, that would be a lol moment if I weren’t so freaked out.

  Keats stands by the steel door waiting for me. He gestures to me to follow. With his features hidden, framed in the half-light of the doorway, he’s the double of a demon. I look backwards, towards the heavy shadow that marks the way to the staircase, my means of escape. Then I remember there are demons waiting for me in the outside world as well. My body stops protesting, heavy and inert as I follow Keats into the basement.

  The basement is a cavernous space. Correction: cavernous. Mustn’t refer to spaces that are dark, enclosed. Underground. It’s rectangular and large and probably goes beyond the footprint of the building and out under the street. The walls are whitewashed with bare bricks poking through in places. I think I can see scorch marks from that murderous blaze all those years ago. But of course I can’t, my overdramatised mind working overtime again. The lighting is a blend of blue neon lights on the ceiling, flickering screens and red pinpoints shivering away on servers and routers. In other places its shade is outright gloom. The ceiling is pure Chicken Lickin’ sky falling, so low that it’s almost as if I can stretch on tiptoes and touch. Or near enough to crush me. Suffocating overheated stale air presses down on me too. Tap. Tap. Tap. Against the pressure point in the crease of my arm this time that I hold behind me so Keats can’t see.

  There’s other tapping in here, the sound of fingers against keyboards. There are rows of desks arranged like a classroom where my darting gaze estimates sit about a dozen guys. Some are dressed in suits and ties while others wear clothes that are so untidy even calling it casual is being generous. No-one looks up or acknowledges my presence, like I’m a ghost passing through. Suddenly it hits – they’re all men. Not a solitary woman among them, which means I’ll be the only one of the opposite sex working here. Unease slithers menacingly through my bloodstream.

  Keats introduces me to no-one.

  A man with no face, workers who ignore me, a room that is intimately acquainted with death, what a contrast to my earlier carefree mood. So much for walking on sunshine.

  Keats leads me to a desk in the middle of the back row where he switches on a computer. As it comes to life, he gestures for me to sit. He sits at the desk next door, which I’m assuming is his own workspace. His head goes down, the edge of the bandana over his lower face flapping once. Am I really sitting next to a man with his face almost concealed? Surreal.

  He types on his keyboard. A high-pitched whooping sound draws my attention to my own screen. There’s a dialogue box with a message.

  Keats: Mr Barrington would like you to finish a report in a folder on your desktop called ‘Project’ by the end of the day. Any problems please send me a message in this box.

  I scowl over at Keats, not that he’s looking my way. Why isn’t he just telling me like other human beings do via the mode of moving their tongue and lips? That’s when I figure it out. Keats hasn’t uttered a word to me yet. Not a ‘good morning’, a ‘how do you do?’, a basic ‘hello’. No face. No talking. What the bloody hell is this?

  Then I feel guilty. Perhaps I’m being unfair, even cruel. Maybe his illness prevents him from speaking. Or he’s on the spectrum. A genius tekkie but socially very awkward? Still, it leaves me feeling like whatever control I’ve clawed back is once again slipping through my fingers. I write back.

  Me: Thank you. Will do.

  I consider popping on a smiley emoji, one of those with a full mouth of teeth that looks as if it’s just dropped some acid, but think better of it. He doesn’t respond. Cracks on with work. So do I. That’s when I notice the continuous low humming noise coming from the walls. My palms go clammy as I type. As I sense the walls breathing around me, pumping blood from a stone heart I can’t see.

  Eight

  I’m riding a horse through the surf on a deserted beach. Sand glittering a rich golden colour. The sun warming my bare arms as I hold the reins. A shy breeze cooling my face, the tangy salt it carries perfume in my nose. The sea is the bluest blue I’ve ever seen, its waves rippling in beautiful silence towards the horizon. I’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do; the strong and wise animal I’m riding does all the work. He doesn’t need leading or steering, he knows where he’s going and I don’t need to know. Rest back, relax and…

  ‘Rach.’ Philip’s voice intrudes from that long-ago summer.

  My eyes punch open with a vengeance. I’m almost choking at the unexpected intrusion of his voice as I try to cope with working in the
bowels of the building. Never has Philip ever been part of the images I magic up during my mindfulness visualisations that I’ve learned from the Net. Maybe it’s this new job reminding me of that other job all those years ago.

  I’ve been in the basement for just over two hours, and for the last ten minutes my head’s been a dome of throbbing pain. It’s bowed, my hands shielding my eyes like a blinkered horse on a racetrack. Occasionally, I hear my heartbeat rattling like the beginnings of a chesty cold. Feel my calf muscles bulge and bunch. Now there’s a sickness inside. Inhale deeply. Another. I squeeze my eyes and it subsides for a while.

  I steal a furtive glance at the masked man next to me.

  Despite the fact that I’m obviously in distress and Michael instructing him to look after me, Keats takes not a blind bit of notice as he hacks away on his keyboard. I bloody well know he can hear my small gasps of air. What does he think I’m doing, having a one-on-one orgasm? The guy’s deliberately tuning me out, I know he is. I’m already regretting making excuses for him upstairs. He wouldn’t know basic human empathy if it tried to tongue him through that stupid bandana. Maybe he doesn’t like women.

  I turn to him and ask in a brusque demanding tone, ‘Where’s the ladies?’

  He doesn’t answer my look with one of his own or answer but types on his keyboard. A message whoops into the message box on my screen.

  Keats: The what?

  Instead of using the option to digitally reply, I quietly snap, ‘The ladies. You know, where women go to the loo as opposed to the gents where blokes go to have a wiz.’

  I know, vulgar, but this creep’s testing all my fraying resolve.

  Keats: Oh that. We haven’t got one.

  I turn again to him. ‘Is this how you’re planning to communicate with me? By message box even though you’re sat right by my side?’

  Keats: Yep.

  I hiss, ‘You’re an idiot.’ Getting angry with Keats is making me feel better.

  Keats: You can use the gents. It’s at the back there.

  My gaze finds it, a battered door at the rear with the outline of a man fixed to it, rather pointless given the male composition of the staff. I hold my nose as I approach; you can smell it’s a men’s bathroom from here.

  When I get inside I sit on the seat and lick my emotional wounds. The lock is an old-fashioned drop latch. The cistern one of those that you only see these days as features in back gardens with plants in them. The chain looks like brass and has a porcelain knob on the end. If you took away the desks, phones and computers, this place could be a time capsule.

  I try to visualise the thousands of pounds Michael has promised me at the end of the month. The debts I will be able to pay off. Going from the red into the black. I try to control my breathing as I massage my temples. None of it works. I’m trapped as securely as a caged animal. A terrified sweatshop girl.

  I don’t have the headspace to think things through but I already know this job is over if it means staying in this basement. Depression descends. How the hell am I going to pay off my debts now? It’s highly unlikely I’ll find another job that pays as well or have, for that matter, a great boss like Michael. Which leaves me where? Only one option. Making that phone call.

  No, I won’t do it. I can’t.

  The rest of the morning follows the same pattern: fifteen or so minutes writhing at my desk and when the anxiety floods inside me like foul water from a drain, heading off to the gents. Calming visualisations that don’t work. Then back to my desk. Rinse and repeat.

  It’s nearly lunchtime and I’m on the gents part of the cycle when I hear the steel door swing open in the basement. Feel the cold breeze from the corridor sweep under the toilet door and stick against the lower half of my legs, sinking into my skin and bones.

  It’s Michael. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

  When I present myself, no doubt resembling someone at the end of the ghost ride at the fair, Michael peers at my face, his dipped brows showing his worry. ‘Are you all right? You look terrible.’

  In fact, everyone down here looks terrible in this blue strip lighting but clearly I take the prize for most lousy-looking employee of the day.

  ‘Not too good actually, bit under the weather.’

  He nods, expression flattening and wiped blank. ‘Right, well, in that case, you should probably think about going home. Do you want to go home?’

  I know how damning this is going to appear, doing a sickie on my second week here, but… ‘That might help.’ He can’t stop the spark of disapproval he snuffs out as quickly as it’s come, so I add, ‘I’m sure I’ll be shipshape tomorrow.’

  The concern for me is back on his face but I feel a barrier between us that wasn’t there before. He probably thinks being sick counts as the disloyal or unreliable behaviour he warned me about at my interview. He escorts me out along the tunnel – I’m not kidding myself this is a corridor – in long strides, which I’m grateful for; I need to get out of this underfoot world like now.

  I stumble up the stairs. Make it through the trap door. The squint of my eyes against the bright light of the foyer reminds me how long I’d been in that subterranean world. Hours. The light bathes me, a baptism of being reborn again. I top up my lungs with urgent gasping wheezing breaths. Michael makes no comment; probably thinks my behaviour is down to my illness.

  Upstairs, in the doorway of his PA’s office, he tells her, ‘Rachel’s unwell. She’s going home.’

  Joanie’s immediately on her feet, her expression a picture of motherly concern. At least one person in this company doesn’t view being ill as some kind of character defect. Is that being too bitchy about Michael? After all, he’s got a business to run and the new girl on his management consultancy block is already playing the sick card.

  ‘Your colour does look a tad off.’ Annoyance flattens Joanie’s mouth. ‘I hope it’s nothing any of the lads said downstairs.’

  Said? I almost bark with insane laughter. They’d have to use their vocal cords, I want to fire back sarcastically. Including Michael’s revered top guy Keats. That home truth is a lump I swallow back. Instead I lie. ‘They’ve been perfect gentlemen. I’m feeling peaky is all.’

  ‘You should go to a doctor, Rach. Don’t come back until you’re your wonderful self again. Isn’t that right, Mr Barrington?’

  Mr Barrington’s lips are sealed.

  Joanie accompanies me to the main door in the foyer, keeping up a brisk mummy bear comforting her cub patter that runs over my head.

  Before I go, she leans in to my ear in the motion of our little secret. ‘Don’t worry about Michael. He’s excited about the project he’s got you and the others working on. It’s also putting him a bit on edge.’ She straightens, our just-between-you-and-me moment over. ‘Maybe see you tomorrow.’

  I tip out eagerly onto the street, greedily gulping lungs of oxygen. Who’d have thought London’s polluted air would taste so sweet? Anything’s better that the fetid air of the basement. I glance at the people I pass and wonder if any of them have ever considered what might be going on under their feet in the street? Of windowless worlds bricked up in the dark? As I stumble down the narrow street, holding my face up to the lukewarm sun, I think of Joanie’s last words. One word in particular.

  Tomorrow.

  There’s going to be no tomorrow for me here. I can’t work down and under. Trapped in the windowless belly of a building that was once a burning sweatshop.

  My only way out is to make the dreaded phone call. My trembling hand pulls out my phone.

  Nine

  I’m going to make a clean breast of it, I reaffirm yet again as the cab deposits me on the driveway of Dad’s home. It’s a grand eighteenth-century house where I changed from my teenage years to a young woman. Growing into my swan phase, except that’s not how it quite played out.

  I’m a nervous ball of energy as I push my key into the door and turn. He’s going to hear the lot today because I’m tired of pretending and tired of running. He’s g
oing to help because he’s a kind man and a good father who loves me. Correction: father. Never that, always Dad. ‘Father’ is a stiff old-style word that implies a man who has a slight distance from his child, that’s the way I see it, whereas Dad is a person who gets stuck in with oodles of unconditional love. I’m all Dad’s got left since Mum died. Making me happy is his main pleasure in life.

  The only thing I will never confess is the root cause of why I’ve messed up so spectacularly. He’s never going to hear about that. Not from my lips.

  My heart clenches at the sight of him in the large gleaming wooden-floored hallway. New lines of worry are etched near his eyes and mouth. There’s a restlessness that surrounds him that suggests he’s been pacing since he got my call. Frank Jordan’s a big man – shoulders, hands, stature, laugh. Head, those who are jealous about his success would also say. Muscle and attitude to life honed after years of hard slog on construction sites before he established his own building empire. Still showcasing a full head of hair, vanity maintaining its original shade. But what’s always fascinated me about my dad is that chipped side tooth of his. He’s got enough money to turn it into something belonging to a Colgate ad, but he never has. It’s as if that tooth is a symbol of the tough Yorkshire mining world he came from and he doesn’t want anyone to forget.

  He reaches me first, in measured strides, and hugs me like he hasn’t seen me for a long time. Too many men are unwilling to demonstrate physical emotions, not my dad. He smothers me with it. ‘Are you all right, pet? You look upset.’ He pulls back to scan my face, not hiding the concern he’s feeling.

  ‘Not too good actually.’ Hesitantly I add, ‘I’ve left my purse at home. Do you mind paying the cabbie outside?’ Beginning a visit that’s all about the truth with a lie about my purse I know isn’t the best way to start but I need to warm up to what I have to say.

  ‘Of course, love,’ he answers in a voice that’s still threaded with his Yorkshire roots. He’s a man who’s proud of where he’s come from, also proud of where he’s got.