“Hello,” whispered George, genially enough.
I opened my eyes wide, and blinked, in what I hoped he’d take as a fond greeting.
I didn’t know how he’d found me, and I never did know. I suppose he might have broken into all the bed and breakfast establishments across the country until he’d got the right one. That seems quite likely.
He said to me, “I’ve got a job! It’s all going to be all right. I’ve got lots of money, and it’s all going to be as it was, and you can come back with me now, and you’ll never be hurt again!” That sounded fine, but his hand was still on my mouth, and pressing down hard, and his fingernails had curved round and were digging painfully into my face.
You started to cry. You didn’t care about being quiet, I don’t know whether you were disturbed by the intruder, or just hungry—I’m guessing it was hungry, you were always hungry. George hasn’t even seen the cot, I think; now he whirled around, and he let me go.
“He’s yours,” I whispered.
“Mine,” he said. And he sounded amused, he seemed to like the sound of that. “You’re both mine,” he said. And he wasn’t bothering to whisper anymore, and that was bad, it meant he didn’t feel the need to be secret anymore.
Mrs. Gallagher didn’t stir. “Is she dead?” George asked bluntly, and laughed.
“No,” I said.
“I want to talk to her.”
Mrs. Gallagher’s eyes opened at that. She was already awake.
“I didn’t steal from you,” George said. “I didn’t steal from you.”
Mrs. Gallagher didn’t say anything to that. Neither did I. George considered.
“Get up,” he said. “Both of you.”
“I’ll come with you, George,” I said. “But you don’t need her, let’s just go.”
He slapped me around the face then, and it wasn’t especially hard, but I hadn’t been slapped for a long while and it hurt.
“We’re all going outside,” he said.
“What are you going to do with her, George?”
“I don’t know,” said George, “I don’t know.” And he sounded genuinely worried about that. I thought he was going to cuff me again, but he didn’t bother.
Mrs. Gallagher got out of bed. She struck a match, and lit a candle. And it was brighter than I expected, too bright, surely; and I saw two things that startled me. One was George himself—his clothes were torn, and he had a ragged beard that seemed in the flickering light a scar across his face. And I realized he had no pride in anything anymore. And the second thing—that was the ugly little knife he was carrying.
“Get moving,” he said.
We walked down the stairs ahead of him. Both of us were in our night dresses, and I thought how cold it would be out there in the dark, and that maybe that was the least of our concerns; the shag carpet was at my bare feet; and you were in my arms, and bless you, you’d gone back to sleep, you weren’t scared of anything, you were with mummy and you felt safe.
I asked George once again what he was going to do, and I tried to find the right things to say that had always made him feel better, the ones that calmed his rages—but it’d been too long, I couldn’t remember any. George didn’t reply, and that was just as well, because it meant I heard Mrs. Gallagher plainly when she hissed at me: “Jump.”
We were in sudden pitch black. She must have blown out the candle.
And I felt her then leap into that black, and I didn’t know how far off the ground we were, I couldn’t judge it at all—I couldn’t tell how many steps there might be, or what was waiting for us at the bottom. And I didn’t care, I leaped too.
George gave a cry of—what? Surprise? Anger? Probably a mixture of both, and he started down the stairs after us, and then he shouted out again, and this time it was fear.
Mrs. Gallagher struck another match. She lit the candle. The glow seemed to take an agonizingly long time to reveal anything.
George had hit the sixteenth step. And then had carried on going downwards. He had found a seventeenth, maybe an eighteenth too. The floor was up just around his knees. It looked as if his legs had been severed, and he was balancing his body on two un-bloodied stumps; no, it looked like the downstairs floor had become a lake, and he had sunk below the surface. And Mrs. Gallagher and me, we, we were walking impossibly upon water.
“Help me,” he said. The light seemed to give him some courage, he even dared show impatience. “Get me out of this.”
He grunted, tried to turn himself about, but there was nowhere for his body to go—nowhere but onwards. And so doing, he took another step.
For a moment I thought his body was in free-fall, but it came to a stop, the line of the floor was now across his chest. He looked so frightened. He grunted again, his face contorted with effort, and he pulled one of his arms free and waved it at us. At me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please. Help me. Please.” He reached out to me. And I think I would have gone had it been for my sake alone. I would have pulled him out. Or he would have pulled me in, more likely, in and under, just as he had done over and over for all those years. I loved him. But there was more than my love to think about now.
He saw that I wasn’t going to help. And I thought he might threaten me. I thought he’d tell me he’d kill me. I think that would have been better. But his face just fell, that’s all, and he looked so very sad.
He tried to pull up his second arm. He couldn’t. He put his free hand flat upon the ground, tried to use it to prise himself out. It was no good.
One more step forward. And now only his head was peeking out, and he had to tilt his face toward the ceiling so he could speak. He said, so softly, as if in awed wonder—“The steps are so steep. Oh God. Oh God. They’re so steep.”
Mrs. Gallagher stepped out. He looked at her with such hope. He thought she might want to save him, even now, in spite of all. I knew she wouldn’t.
She stood right beside his head. If he’d wanted to, he could have bitten her feet. If he’d wanted to. He looked up at her, and she looked down on him, and she didn’t gloat.
He opened his mouth to say something, and she shook her head, and he closed it again.
She blew out the candle.
When the guests came we’d tell them of the noises in the attic, and the cold chill in the breakfast room, and of the extra step the staircase would grow in the dark. We didn’t talk of the strange footsteps under the house, the ones you could hear just sometimes, when the sea was quiet and the wind was at a lull. They didn’t need to know everything.
I said that nothing untoward ever happened between me and Mrs. Gallagher, and nor it did. But I wouldn’t have minded.
I told her too late. She was dying, and fading so fast—she’d started the holiday season with the same no-nonsense energy as always, but then she’d got so slow, and so tired, and eventually we just asked our guests to leave and closed the doors on them. She lay in the bed and I gave her all the space I could, I’d have moved to another room, but she told me she wanted me to stay by her in the night. I said that I loved her. I said that I had loved her for so long, and wanted to show her, wanted to do anything to her that would make her happy.
She smiled at me. She said, “That would have been nice.”
And I kissed her. I kissed her sand-studded cheeks, her skin was so coarse beneath my lips and there was nothing I could do to make it soft.
Still she never snored, still she slept so peacefully that some nights I woke up thinking she might already be dead. And there was that one night I woke, and she wasn’t there beside me. She hadn’t moved from the bed for over a week, she hadn’t the strength, and I was so frightened, I thought maybe she’d died and her body had simply melted away. I left the bedroom, went out into the darkness of the house, I lit a candle, I called for her. There I found her, down the staircase, on the bottom step, and she was stamping down on it weakly, without stopping, a
s if she couldn’t stop, not until I spoke to her. She turned up to me, up to the light. “I can’t get through,” she said. “Why won’t it let me through?” It was the only time I ever saw her cry.
She died only a few days later. I wasn’t there for the very end, but I don’t think it would have mattered much to her, she didn’t know where she even was by then, and if she called out a name it would be Thomas. Her missing husband, maybe? Even a son? Who knows? At the end of the day there was still so little I knew about her.
We found her body, you and I. You weren’t scared at all. You are still so young, and so fearless. You don’t even remember, do you?
I know you don’t remember Mrs. Gallagher. My Nathalie. My own. But she was good to you. I wish you’d ask about her, and not about your father.
You know most of the rest of it.
Mrs. Gallagher had left the house to me in her will. I had no idea, she had never discussed it with me. But I was not a blood relative, of course, and certainly could not have been considered a spouse, and after the death duties were paid there was no way I could afford to keep it. I sold it on.
Bed and breakfasts were all I knew now, that and the sea. I didn’t want to stay in the town, too many people seemed to know about me and my relationship with Mrs. Gallagher, and I had no shame of it, but I wanted nothing to do with them. That’s why I moved us to the south coast, so far away, and bought our little hotel here. The sea here is warmer, the wind not as fierce, but I don’t mind, I’m getting old too.
I want you to understand this. You are not your father.
Your father was not a good man, though he wasn’t a bad man entirely. And you, I know there is good in you. I know you are better than he was. You must try to be better. The path you are treading, it isn’t the way. You have been caught stealing once, and we were lucky that charges were not pressed, and I know that if you’ve been caught once you’ve got away with it a dozen times before. And I know your business with the girls downtown too, you think I don’t hear? Mary Suffolk, and that Annie girl. And I don’t judge. But you mustn’t be cruel to them. Please, not cruel.
And you despise my hotel, and you despise me, and you want to leave, and I understand that. And all you want to know about is your father.
I have told you what I know.
And in the night sometimes, in the pitch black, I have gone down the stairs, and counted them off. I know you have heard me. I know that you have heard, but don’t like to ask. I shall tell you anyway. Because Mrs. Gallagher told me. That when all those years ago she lost her husband. Thomas, or whatever his name was, when he found that extra step, and all those steps leading downwards from it, ever on downwards with no bottom most likely. She told me that it wasn’t in that house that she’d lost him. She moved away, and bought another hotel, right at the edge of the land, where she felt she could be free of him. And the extra step had followed her. Her husband had followed.
Because maybe we can’t just bury our mistakes and move on. Maybe we carry them around with us, regardless. Maybe I’ll never be free of George. That seems right. That seems just. He’s had his punishment, I’ll take mine.
I go down the stairs. And there are twenty-one steps in the daytime. I can feel a twenty-second in the night.
You’re not your father, and you’re young, and you need to make your own mistakes. So go make them. But don’t make too many. I have come too far, and sacrificed too much. I will not tolerate it.
I want to make sure you never have to join your father.
You’ve complained about sounds beneath the floorboards in your bedroom. Stamp your feet hard, that’ll usually shut the bastard up.
OUR FALLEN SONS
The king had won another war, and wanted the victory commemorated, and decreed that a statue of himself on horseback leading his troops into battle should be designed, carved, and copied, and erected throughout the land in every single city, town, municipality, and all villages containing a population of more than five hundred souls. The village of K_ had nearly six hundred souls in it. And so it was that the court engineers came and set a statue down right in the middle of the square. It was made of grey stone—it was said that marble had been reserved for the cities alone—and was some twenty feet tall; the horse stood up ready to charge, and balancing upon its hind legs looked for all the world as if it were on tiptoes; and on its back the king raised a sword high, or maybe it was a cutlass, and his mouth was wide open, presumably in the act of shouting out some heroic order or other. The king’s nostrils were flared; so were the horse’s. The people of K_ quite liked the statue, really; it was a talking point, and it was something to shelter beneath when the sun was hot. And then, one day, not very long after, the king decided it was time to go to war again, and that he would need all the young men to fight alongside him. And in a trice the young men left, and the population of K_ dipped far below five hundred, and really they no longer qualified for a statue at all.
A year passed, and the young men never came home, and it became clear they never would. The burgomaster went to see the stonemason. He proposed that the statue be turned into a memorial to all those from K_ who had died and would not return; at the top of the plinth the stonemason could engrave the words our glorious dead, and beneath that, in smaller writing but very neat, the names of all the young heroes. “Do you like ‘Our Glorious Dead’?” said the burgomaster. “I was also toying with ‘Our Fallen Sons.’” The stonemason told him he could have both, if he were paid a couple more coins for the effort, and the burgomaster readily agreed. The burgomaster produced a list of all the names that needed to be carved into the stone, there were exactly a hundred of them, and the stonemason decided that if he carved one name every morning, and one name every afternoon, then that would be two names carved a day, and the job would take fifty days to complete.
And so it was. It was another warm summer, but the stonemason was in the best possible place in the whole of K_, working in the cool shadow of the statue. In the morning he would carve a name upon one side of the plinth; in the afternoon, when the sun had moved, he would carve a name upon the other side. There was no order to the names, he would engrave them at random, he looked down the list to see whichever name caught that day’s fancy. And the people of K_ would come and see how he was progressing, and when the day came that he would choose the name of one of their dead sons, they would get so excited, and read the name out loud in wonder, and press their fingers into the inscriptions and marvel at the weird shapes of the letters, and weep for joy that at last their sacrifice had been acknowledged.
One evening Mr. and Mrs. Klein came to see the stonemason. Mr. and Mrs. Klein had no children. The stonemason couldn’t guess what they might possibly want.
They stood there in his cottage and looked nervous.
“We would like you to engrave the name of our son,” Mr. Klein said.
“We have money,” said Mrs. Klein.
“You don’t have a son,” pointed out the stonemason.
“But not for want of trying,” said Mr. Klein, and he blushed bright red, and Mrs. Klein looked down to the ground. “We wanted a son so very much. But we were never so blessed.”
The stonemason had put in a long day’s engraving, he had chosen a name that afternoon that had four whole syllables to it, and he was tired. “You’ll have to leave,” he said. “I don’t see how I can help you.”
Mrs. Klein said, “If we had had a boy, he would have been taken from us. He would have gone to fight in the war. And we would have lost him, just as assuredly as all the others. We would have had a hero too. It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault I was never strong enough to bear one.”
“Please,” said Mr. Klein. “Honour our fallen son. We only want what’s right.”
“We have money,” said Mrs. Klein again.
The stonemason said, “What name did you want?”
“Raphael.”
“Raphael? Really?�
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“It is what,” said the Kleins, “we would certainly have called him.”
The stonemason felt shamed by the new commission, but he didn’t know why. He knew he couldn’t engrave the name on the statue with all the village there to see. So, sleepy as he was, he lit a candle, and went out then and there, he took up his chisel and he tapped out this latest child who had been lost in war. The moon hid behind the clouds, and the mason’s arms were weak, and it took hours to complete the job. For the sake of the real martyrs, he made sure that Raphael Klein’s name was slightly smaller than theirs.
He had barely had an hour’s sleep when he was woken by someone thumping at his front door.
The burgomaster was furious. “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “How this discredits the tragedy of the lads who so bravely died for us? The lads who actually existed?”
The mason stood his ground. When confronted by any extremity of emotion, he always chose to imitate the stone he worked with and understood so well: his face became impassive, his shoulders slumped hard as granite. “I just follow orders,” he said.
“Indeed!” said the burgomaster. “But not for nothing, I’ll bet. How much were you paid?”
“Two silver coins.”
“Two silver coins! So, that’s the price of our town’s integrity!”
A couple of hours later the burgomaster returned.
“Two silver coins,” he scoffed. “Look here. I’ve brought you five gold coins. And for them I want you to give me two sons. One is called Peter, the other is called Pyotr. They were good boys, strong boys. Identical, born in the very same hour, you couldn’t have told them apart—but I could, I could. Twins, and always the best of friends. They were the world to me. And they marched off to war together, and first they slapped me on the back, they said to me, Papa, if we never meet again, it’ll be for a higher cause—and they laughed, because they were men, do you see? And I laughed too. They gave me the courage to laugh. Pyotr joined the cavalry, Peter the infantry. And they died together, at the exact same time. Peter was stabbed through the heart in the midst of battle; elsewhere on the field, Pyotr’s horse was blown up by a mortar shell. They died at the very same instant, inseparable even at the end—and they never knew. They never even knew.” And the burgomaster cried. The stonemason knew that the burgomaster had sent four sons off to war already; with the twins, that made it a tidy half dozen.
They Do the Same Things Different There Page 30