The Gilded Ones

by Brooke Fieldhouse

  But something was very different. The floor had been excavated to a depth of four inches and was awaiting the next batch of ready-mix. The first section of concrete had now been poured and plywood shuttering had been fixed across the corridor just the other side of Hood’s office. It seemed unlikely that there would be a further pouring today until the first had dried sufficiently to walk on.

  I strode the remaining few yards to the door, stopped, listened – nothing. Even the hum of the ready-mix motor was silent. I tapped on the door, nothing… Squeezed the handle; it was dark inside – thank God! I switched on the light and stepped up the additional four inches and into the office while carefully closing the door behind me.

  I became abruptly aware of how nervous and exhausted I was, and it was all I could do to stop myself sitting down. But I had work to do. I crossed to the noticeboard and – using my right hand as a guide – examined every scrap of paper, my eye moving from left to right.

  As usual the noticeboard was covered in information; footballers, jazz musicians, wrestling fixtures, past and forthcoming; displays of karate, racing, nuclear war, the Moors Murderers, and private zoos. There was also a welter of handwritten personal information. It was going to take me some time and I was beginning to feel so anxious that I found myself working with both hands, one supporting the other. Every so often I paused, strained to listen. What I was searching for wasn’t coming up.

  I must have spent ten minutes tracing my fingers back and forth across the noticeboard. Nothing, I couldn’t even see the one with the Freia information on it. I stood back trying to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. This whole journey had been a waste of time, and I was risking life and limb for nothing.

  It was only when I half-closed my eyes that I noticed that where the Freia note had been there was an empty square of cork. Someone had removed it – yes there was the drawing pin, someone had ripped the note away and as I half-looked again I could see another gap in the patchwork of paper, and another drawing pin this time with a tiny scrap of pale blue paper adhering to it. It could have been anything but I was so hyped up I’d convinced myself it was what I’d been looking for.

  Out of desperation I looked on the floor, on the desk, rummaged through the waste-paper basket – anywhere where the two Post-it notes might have fallen or been discarded. There were definitely two notes and both of them had been removed. This was the end of the road, and what an idiot I’d been to pursue it in the first place. I had no alternative but to get the hell out and forget everything.

  My brain was so busy commiserating with itself that at first, I failed to hear the sound outside the door in the corridor. It was the mewing of a cat followed by the sound of feet, one foot leading – the other dragging behind. I felt a sudden chill to my torso, just where I imagined my spleen to be. I could feel the cold touch moving, past my duodenum, liver, and round to my kidneys. It travelled into my pelvic area, across my thighs, down through my calves until the flesh over my entire body was creeping. The mewing and the footsteps had stopped and I heard a distinct metallic click. The footsteps retreated.

  Before I’d even reached the door and tried the handle I knew it wouldn’t open because I’d remembered that, unlike the door at the Railway Club, this one had a keyhole, it was lockable. I was a prisoner.

  The first thing I had to do was to control my breathing… Breath is what develops curiosity, kindness, and self-respect, and it was keeping in touch with my breath and the laws of gravity that was going to save me from having a panic attack. It was also quite possibly going to save me from interrogation, assault, torture, and death – or at least make the whole process easier to bear.

  Before I’d even stepped away from the noticeboard I’d had an idea of how to escape, but I was in such a state of deep freeze I was terrified to even think it in case the door suddenly burst open.

  The room I was standing in was 2.8 metres high, but I’d noted that the kitchen, the gabardine factory area, and the dance floor were all 4.5 metres high. That meant that between the false ceiling and the original Victorian vaulted ceiling was a void – a series of voids. Almost certainly these voids were interconnected – when the whole thing had been a mill, each floor would have been a vast open space interrupted only by cast-iron columns. Somehow, it should be possible to move freely through or above each space. At the edge of the building there could be a way to the outside.

  I needed to act fast; i) there was the distinct possibility that whoever locked the door might return at any second, ii) I was quite possibly on the point of some kind of nervous collapse.

  It was no good climbing up and standing on the desk. I would be able to remove a ceiling tile easily enough but I would not be able to pull myself up. I looked around – praying as I did so that I was not alerting the sixth sense of any individual who might be in the vicinity, and about to return.

  There was a visitor’s chair, ten cardboard boxes stacked against the wall next to the metal filing cabinet. But as I moved back towards the door I saw it, an aluminium step ladder. As I opened it and climbed I fought to dismiss from my mind that it had been left there deliberately, for me.

  I balanced on the ladder. A ceiling tile popped up at the touch of my finger. It was sitting on the flange of a metal ‘T’ section and I could see that if I could just get up there that these steel struts would be my pathway.

  Standing on the top platform of the ladder I was able to pull myself up by rocking my arms and legs. Once above the level of the false ceiling it was possible to move and keep a vertical position, but only if I bent my head and knees forward simultaneously. It was paramount that I kept to the metal flanges. A millimetre’s deviation could end in me plunging back through the soft fibre of the ceiling tiles.

  The next thing I needed to do was to pull the ladder up behind me and into the space. When my gaoler entered the room, they would no doubt expect to find me cringing pathetically, either behind the cabinet or under the desk, awaiting torture and death. Removing the ladder would at least cause them a moment’s confusion when they found the room empty. But even lying across the metal framework I could not reach the ladder to pull it up after me. In the end, I managed to lasso it with the strap of my shoulder bag and pulled it up through the opening below me. With the step ladder laid horizontally across the ceiling and the tile replaced, I was still a prisoner but with a strange new kind of freedom to roam this powdery no-man’s-land until I could find a way to break free from the building.

  Having gathered my breath and thoughts, I decided that Hood would not return so soon. His method would be to abandon his prisoner for at least a couple of hours so that by the time he put the key into the lock the internee would be a gibbering wreck. He might possibly leave his victim there all night.

  As my vision began to adjust I looked around me. I was squatting on the metal framework which held the ceiling tiles with the ladder lying next to me. I stared carefully at the ceiling tile which I had just replaced, but because I’d turned and shifted my position several times I was no longer able to visualize the layout of the room below me. Where was the door, the corridor? In which direction was the Formica office and the outside wall? I could see my hand in front of me but only as shape and movement and I realized that I had no idea which way to go. I attempted to lift the ceiling tile but couldn’t. Each time I shifted my position I could smell brick dust, old mortar, metal that hadn’t been oiled, an accumulation of unwanted debris. I groped with my right hand and held up something almost weightless close to my face; it was a flattened empty packet of twenty Embassy Tipped cigarettes.

  I would need to start again. I was going to need to create my own map with starting point, landmarks, ground zero. I must establish areas of smell, texture, and temperature. My watch said ten past twelve, I would time myself. I decided that the position in which I’d placed the ladder would form a kind of compass, its top would be my imaginary north – of course I’d be
wrong, but so long as it was relative, the system could start to work and my map would begin to take shape.

  I swung my body round so it was aligned with the top of the ladder. I turned and began to move forward, a foot at a time, fanning the air in front of me. After six moves I could feel sheet metal below me perforated with tiny holes at regular intervals. I was squatting on top of a cable tray, it was like giant Meccano, and it would make sense for me to follow it. For one thing, it would take my body weight. But it carried with it a special new kind of hazard. Supposing there were uninsulated power cables? I would have to risk that. I also had a new advantage; somewhere there was a light source, I could now see where I was travelling but I was gripped by an overwhelming drowsiness and realized that I desperately needed to sleep. I’d been on the go since 0500hrs and the stress had taken its toll on my nervous system. Without further ado, I curled up on the cable tray and drifted into unconsciousness.

  I peered at my watch. For some unearthly reason, it said four o’clock, I had slept for four hours. I had need to pee and in the new brighter light of my over-world I looked at the odd assortment of stuff littering the cable tray and surrounding area; a shirt box, a pair of protective goggles, what looked like an anorak, and a tangle of metal coat hangers. Outside the cable tray and resting on a powdering of unidentifiable fuzz was a two-pound jam jar – without label, and though dusty it seemed reasonably clean. Praying that it had not contained caustic soda I relieved myself into it and left it sitting on the tray like a giant medical sample awaiting the attentions of health visitor with litmus paper.

  I could now see some considerable distance in all directions. The cable tray on which I perched was a small part of a much larger system criss-crossing a huge area. Above me was the low dark vault of the ceiling with its knobbly cast iron columns each casting its shadow and catching tiny silver threads of light.

  The floor – for in my present predicament that’s what it was – was more difficult to comprehend. It seemed to be at different levels, angles, there were unidentifiable dark jagged lumps which almost reached the ceiling. Some things I could begin to recognize; heating ducts, pipes, nodes, ferrules. Here and there were sumps of different widths, depths – everywhere I looked was debris of various sorts and sizes. Lying on top of a cast iron pipe was another cigarette packet, Capstan Full Strength. The archaeology of my surroundings was taking shape, and where there was original brickwork there would be evidence of rolling and pipe tobacco, ancient dermal deposits, hair follicles, the evaporated bodily fluids of those who had hauled, clanged, and bolted into position the cast iron columns. I needed to focus my mind on getting out.

  I could see the aluminium ladder lying ten feet away and wondered why it was catching the light. Had someone switched the light on in the room below? I strained to hear human sound, but all I could hear was a distant hum of unidentified machine parts echoing through space. I decided to follow the cable tray towards the source of light.

  Sometimes I crawled, at others I adopted an animalistic lope, my backside swaying in the air while using my hands as paws to pad my way forward over the metal. I was now some distance away from the ladder and as the light became brighter I could feel my mind preparing itself for freedom. It was dashed. The cable tray came to a halt, and in front of me I could see no more than a vertical screen of perforated metal. Below me the space fell away the full four and a half metres. Beyond the metal mesh was a steel spider’s web of lights, gantries, and rigs. Lacelike non-structures, and patterns of light and shadow were slowly wheeling across the smooth gunmetal floor. There was silence except for the faint mewing of a cat and, though foreshortened by perspective, I recognized almost directly below me the familiar figure of a man.

  Twenty-five

  The only consolation in having glimpsed the frightening scene below me was that I now knew where I was. The centre of one of the two bars adjacent to the dance floor lined through exactly with the end of the cable tray – the way I’d just come. My fear-stimulated mind recalled that it was also the way that Dickson and I had entered the main auditorium on my first visit. All I had to do was to return to the place I’d started from and keep going. That would take me to the edge… the edge of the building, somewhere in the vicinity of the Formica office… But my watch said five o’clock, and it had taken me almost an hour to get here from the spot above Hood’s office. There was nothing else for it, I turned my body around and began my painful lope back. I sincerely hoped that Stripy had not given my position away.

  Since my sleep, my senses seemed to have become more intense. My smell and taste were in a state of anticipation, but everything seemed odourless and dead, and I was filled with a sudden desire to return to the smelly raucous world of life.

  The features of the unknown territory beyond the ladder seemed to belong to an age older than the twentieth century. There were elephantine cast iron boilers, a metallic tangle of pipes between which I had to crawl, and I was forced to make frequent detours. Sometimes the pipes were so close to the vault above me, or the false ceiling below that I feared I would get stuck. It was how I imagined potholing to be, only above instead of below ground. The only form of rescue would be starvation.

  I became aware of a different kind of luminescence and I now knew why when I’d woken up that everything had seemed lighter. The storm had passed and I could see spokes of sunlight coming through a row of windows ahead. They were tall, wide, and subdivided into two-foot by one-foot panes of glass with steel frames. Each reached down to waist height above the floor far below me and reminded me of the windows in a Victorian school where it was possible to open the top section by pulling on a cord which activated a pivot. I found myself balancing, holding onto the metal window frames with my hands, while standing on the edge of what must have been the ceiling of the room hidden below me. Only the edge of it would take my weight.

  I felt a modicum of relief as outside the windows I could see the familiar sight of the saliva-coloured glazed tiles, and my eye was just about level with the cinder-covered surface of that desolate yard. I yanked on the cord and the opening section of the window plunged to the horizontal. By bracing my right foot against the junction of wall and ceiling I was able to get my left leg through the first window. I could feel the coolness of a breeze as my trouser leg rode up to my knee. I pushed off with my right foot while listening to the sound of my own panting. I was now perched in mid-air, astride the window frame and trying to force my head sufficiently low to pass under the pivot. As I tipped my right leg I lost my balance, fell through the open window, and was left hanging fifteen feet above the stone path below me. I must have looked like the victim of a short-drop lynching. I reached through the open window and tugged the cord as if I were hauling in the rope of a boat. When the bulk of the cord was hanging outside the window I gave a final pull. The window snapped shut, and I abseiled the rest of the way, trying as I did so to place my feet on metal frame, not glass. As my feet hit the bottom sill the cord ran out and I jumped the final few feet landing in the trench like a badly performing discus thrower.

  Without pausing for breath, I lumbered forward, up steps, across cinders, past scratched and stained steel containers, and through the gap in the wall where I stopped, dusted myself down and attempted in some pain, to walk nonchalantly across the road. Well done Pulse! You didn’t get the information you wanted but you survived. I could almost hear my self-congratulatory tones. Now all I had to do was walk to the car and drive away.

  I rounded the corner of the street where I’d left the car. I’d parked it facing downhill away from the club but on the ‘wrong’ side of the road so the passenger door was next to the pavement. Leaning against it was a human figure; tall, yellow check suit, cigarette ash-hued hair, gold pince-nez. It was no good, there was nowhere for me to go, and he’d seen me.

  ‘Wotcheer, Puck!’

  ‘Hello, Mel, fancy seeing you here.’ I was trying to pat the grime from my trousers, h
ide the tear in my jacket sleeve. My face must have looked like a coal miner coming off a shift. I drew level with him and stopped halfway between the wall and his lanky form. We stood eyeing one another; I didn’t want to be the first to speak.

  ‘Sorry, Puck, Hoody, don’t like loose ends,’ he said it deadpan looking me straight in the eye. There was nothing I could say, I was bracing myself.

  Without taking his eye from mine his hand moved upward across his body towards his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Guess what I’ve got in my pocket.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mel,’ my voice sounded amazingly steady, my heart was about to go into full panic attack. It was no good running. Stepping backwards wasn’t an option, I would be a perfect target outlined against the brick wall, better to move closer to him. Surreptitiously I moved my left foot forward. He saw what I was doing and his hand completed the movement to his chest. I tensed myself. As I brought my right foot forward his hand reappeared and he held it towards me, palm downward and cupped as if it contained something.

  He lifted his other hand and held it forward in an identical manner, so that he looked like a giant musterlander in the act of begging. Then he began moving both his hands, swapping their positions and jiggling them about as if he were a magician.

  ‘Choose a hand, Puck.’ His eyes still didn’t leave mine… Sod it! I pointed to a hand and he turned it over.

  Curled and fitting neatly against his palm was a yellow Post-it note. His eyes still didn’t leave mine. He resumed his hand juggling.