by Paul Haines
“Hi,” Rat says. He sits up, still wrapped in the sleeping bag. “Sorry, am I in your way?”
“Not at all,” the Rastafarian says. “Maybe you were, once, but I’ve adapted, yes?”
The Rastafarian drops into a crouch, his face filling Rat’s vision.
“Up or down?” the Rastafarian says.
“Down,” Rat says.
“How far?” the Rastafarian says.
“As far as I can,” Rat says. “Then a few steps further, just for good luck.”
“Brave,” the Rastafarian says.
“Maybe,” Rat says. “Maybe I’m just stupid.”
The Rastafarian grins again. His dreadlocks are pooled around, spreading over step 6,417. He looks at the backpack that Rat’s been using as a pillow.
“Big pack,” the Rastafarian says. “You’re prepared, so you aren’t stupid. Foolish, maybe, but not stupid.”
The Rastafarian looks at Rat, his brown eyes so dark they look like giant pupils. Rat squirms.
“So,” Rat says. “Up or down?”
“Both,” the Rastafarian says. “Neither. Depends on my mood.”
“You’re a strange man,” Rat says. The Rastafarian nods, dreadlocks sliding across the marble. He stands up and offers Rat a hand.
“Come on,” the Rastafarian says. “Big day ahead.”
Rat nods. He lets the Rastafarian lift him onto his feet. He folds the sleeping bag and stows it in the backpack while the Rastafarian watches. It’s hot again, the air thick with yeast, but the Rastafarian smells like hair-oil and cinnamon.
The Rastafarian ascends. Rat descends. Both of them have their hands on the mahogany banister. Rat can hear the Rastafarian’s hair swishing against the marble as the Rastafarian walks away.
* * *
Step 6,500: I never wanted to hear about your exes.
Marlo loved her Rasta boyfriend because he scored her free weed. She’d told Rat as much when she was explaining her ex-boyfriends. The revelation made Rat feel inadequate. He’d never scored Marlo weed, free or otherwise. The only greenery he’d given her was a potted plant, and that died on her windowsill after three weeks of neglect.
Step 7,000: I loved you. I didn’t love you. I can’t really remember anymore.
Rat stops for lunch. It isn’t much; a cheese sandwich on rye bread, slightly squashed after two days in the pack. It tastes great. A day-and-a-half over, and Rat is already sick of trail mix. The cheese is waxy, a little flavourless, but it hits the spot. He wasn’t supposed to eat it today, but the stairwell is hotter now, and the cheese wasn’t travelling well.
He sips water from a flask. It’s tepid. He digs through the pack and pulls out the guidebook, looking for the pink post-it tag that marks Rat’s notes for the second day.
The guidebook says that this is the toughest part, the second day of descent. It’s the part where most people start to think about turning around, heading back up to the surface in order to escape the heat. A day-and-a-half of climbing means you’ve lost sight of the top of the stairs.
Rat stands up and leans over the balustrade. He looks down. He looks up. The guidebook is right—both directions look the same. He knows the top is up there, somewhere, but he can’t see it.
Rat checks the clicker. He has covered 8,369 steps. He could turn around now if he wanted. No-one would really know. It’s not like he told anyone his plans. It’s not like he should be ashamed. He’s already eaten the sandwich he was saving for the third day. Most people turn around on the second day of climbing. Rat has always been good at giving up.
He can’t think of anything to write on step 8,500. He sits on the marble, chin in his hands, staring at Marlo’s ashes. Eventually he uncaps the sharpie and writes Happy Birthday. It doesn’t really work. Rat crosses it out. Then he writes Happy Birthday Happy Birthday Happy Birthday.
Marlo always said that repeating something thrice meant you didn’t really mean it.
The world’s second-longest stair is in Switzerland, dug into the side of a mountain. Rat knows this because the guidebook told him, and because someone has put a plaque on the appropriate step. The world’s second-longest stair has 11,674 steps.
Rat stops to read the plaque this time, trying to feel like he’s accomplished something.
He doesn’t. He just feels sore. His legs are burning
He stops for the night on step 11,700. He writes I’m sorry. I did love you on the marble because he’s too tired to think of anything better. He sets up his sleeping bag and uses it to cover the declaration. He tosses and turns all night, bothered by the heat. The yeasty smell gets worse at night. It makes Rat’s nose twitch.
Marlo was going out with one of Rat’s friends. He probably shouldn’t have slept with her that first time, even after she said she’d broken up with the other guy. Rat wasn’t always called Rat, but he’d earned himself the name and it suited him too well to go away.
On step 12,073 he sees his first suicide. The body whistles past, not even screaming anymore. Rat’s surprised by the way the arms and legs twist, struggling against the fall.
On step 50,500 he writes There were many expressions you used that drove me crazy. I still think of killing someone every time I hear the words “done and dusted” in conversation. Nothing is ever done. Nothing is ever dusted.
He is on his second sharpie. He killed the first after forgetting to replace the cap while writing on step 15,000.
He runs out of sandwiches on the forth day of climbing, but there’s plenty of trail mix and tins of beans. The plan was to descend until he ran out of things to say. Rat never bothered thinking about how he’d ascend once the task was done.
On step 120,000 he writes Fuck cancer. He crosses this out and writes It wasn’t my fault. Deep down, he believes neither of these things, despite the fact that he should. The doctors were wrong; it wasn’t the cancer that killed her.
The heat turns slick and humid 300 steps later. His rubber soles squeak against the moisture coating the ancient marble.
At step 120,828 he pauses and pulls the guidebook out of his backpack. He flicks through the worn pages, looking at the detailed notes he’s scrawled into the margins. Pauses on the photograph of the step he’s reached. The point of no return, the deepest step anyone’s reached and still returned to the surface. He’s followed the guidebook’s advice when it comes to supplies. His pack is lighter now, easier to handle, but he could still return.
Rat tosses the book over the balustrade. He looks up the stairwell, then down. Sweat streams across his forehead, soaks through his T-shirt. Rat’s been wearing the same outfit for days. He’s pretty sure he smells.
“Hello?” he says, and his voice echoes across the stairwell. His throat is dry, so he drinks some water. More than he should, regardless of his decision. Rat figures he can extend his supply a little this far down, assuming he’s willing to lick condensation off the stairs.
He pulls Marlo out of his pack and holds her in both hands. Better to do it now, regardless of the decision. This is where they were headed when they’d first planned to come here. Too many things could go wrong once he moved into uncharted territory.
“We made it, babe,” Rat says. His thumbnail punctures the plastic and sets the ashes free. The cloud disperses across the empty space, descends on the breeze. Slow-moving, delicate, waiting for the next suicide to freefall through its mass. Even in death Marlo is beautiful. Rat misses her more than anything.
He sits down on step 120,829 and grieves, shedding tears for the first time.
Step 121,500: We were never meant to be happy. I’m no longer sure that matters.
On step 200,000 Rat commits an act of poetry. He chooses to keep descending. Poetry bothers him less this far down the stairwell.
Rat knows three things to be true. The first is this: he will run out of food and water before he runs out of things to say. Two: what goes down need not emerge at the surface. Three: there will be no ending. The ending lies above, at the first step, in the
life he’d live if he walked away. Endings are destinations and the Stair has but one, found only by backtracking and returning to the beginning.
The heat gets worse as he hits the lower depths. The balustrade is hot enough to redden his palms. Rat sheds clothing, equipment, leaves his sleeping bag on a step. The sharpies leak in his pockets, bleeding ink across his thighs.
That Girl
Kaaron Warren
St Martin’s was clean, you could say that at least. Apart from the fine mist of leg hair, that is. I watched as Sangeeta (“You know me. I am Sangeeta.”) crawled through the women’s legs, a long piece of thread hanging from between her teeth. She stroked a shin, a knee, looking for hairs to pluck.
“Come on, Sangeeta. All the ladies are bald, now. You’ll have to find a dog.” The head nurse was very kind when there were visitors, the inmates told me.
They sat along the wide verandah that wrapped around their dorm. Like many verandahs in Fiji, it acted as their social centre. It was the only place in the hospital with comfortable chairs. The dining hall, in a collapsing once-white building behind the dorm, had hard chairs designed to make you eat quickly; the art therapy room, across the loosely-pebbled driveway, had stools. This was one of the things I wanted to change; put comfy chairs in so the women could sit and stitch, or paint, or weave. At present they made small pandanus fans and carved turtles from soap to be sold at the annual bazaar. My funding covered a month, and came from a wealthy Australian woman who’d visited St Martins and been depressed at the state of the art therapy room, with paintings so old there was more dust than paint. They had no supplies at all. My benefactor hired me to sort out the physical therapy room, perhaps train the nurses in some art techniques. The nurses loved the sessions with me and used them to gossip, mostly.
Sangeeta dragged herself up using the band of my skirt. “You’ve got too many hairs in your eyebrows. And your lip is like a hairy worm.”
I turned a stare on her and she shrank.
The head-nurse said, “You comment on our guest’s appearance? Are you perfect? There are things you will need to learn, Sangeeta. If you want to return to your life in Suva.”
Sangeeta primped her hair. “I am a beauty therapist. Of course I am beautiful.” Her face was deeply scarred by acne. Open wounds went septic so easily in the tropics. There was a red slash across her throat, vivid shiny skin, and two of her fingers were bent sideways. The fingernails were painted and chipped, bitten to the quick. “I studied in Australia. I married an Australian man but he went mad every full moon.”
“Of course he did,” the head nurse said. “He was cursed on your honeymoon at Raki Raki.”
“He upset the witches. He didn’t believe they were witches and took a photo of me kissing one of their pigs. Then he said I smelled like bacon and could not make love to me.”
“You are blessed,” one of the other inmates said. “You will die untouched.”
“My second husband turned out to be gay,” Sangeeta said, all the time the thread hanging from her mouth. She held the thread taut. “Can I pluck your hairs? Make you smooth?”
The other women set up a clamor, all wanting to do something for me. To me.
Only the old lady at the end of the verandah sat quietly, her lips moving. I walked over to her and bent my head down. “What is it, dear?” I said.
“I am that girl,” she said. “I am that girl.”
She was very thin. Her skin was wrinkled, looking like the folds of brown velvet—a hand-made soft toy for an ungrateful child.
“I am that girl,” the old woman said. Not much else. She would demand more porridge if it were on, and sometimes sing if the prayer was in Hindi. I would learn all this in the next few days.
She grabbed at me with sharp fingernails. They should have been clean; everything else was here, but I saw a dark red ridge I didn’t like. If she was a painter I would have guessed at Russet Red, but she was not a painter. A strong smell of bleach filled the air. I suspected it was their only cleaning fluid.
“What girl does she mean?”
The head nurse shook her head. “We don’t know. Malvika has been saying that for a long time now. She’s been here since she was a teenager. Appeared one night, they say. Filthy, torn up, you’ve never seen such a thing, the old nurse told me. Nobody wanted her. Her family said no thank you. She’s not our worst, though.” She put her hand on a mess of a girl curled in a chair. “This one here came out of the womb this way. Her family kept her in a small bure at the back of their house until she got pregnant. No one knows who the father was but they say it was a dog.” The poor girl looked like she’d been grown in a jar. She was twisted and folded over herself and she chewed her lip as if it were food. My fingers itched to draw her, and the old woman, too. Not as part of my funding, but for pleasure. I paint the daily details of life, to make sense of the world and here the details were vast and many layered.
* * *
After the shift was over the head nurse took me to the suburb of Lami, where we looked at second-hand clothes which smelled so full of mould and mothballs you could never wash it out. We went into the dark, rotting shed which passed for a market. Piles of vegetable waste sat in their own sludge, but on the tables beautiful purple eggplant, hands of bananas, small, aromatic tomatoes. The nurse talked in Fijian to the stall holders and they smiled at me, nodding, welcoming.
“Artist!” one of them said. “Oh, mangosa!”
“Mangosa means smart,” the head nurse said. “She says you are smart if you are an artist. There’s the dog,” she whispered. She pointed at an enormous yellow mongrel. He sat with his back against a post, his back legs stretched out, his front paws lolling. He sat like a man. I’ve never seen balls the size of those he displayed, bigger than cricket balls and a dark grayish pink.
“He’s the one they say got poor Dog Girl pregnant. They say her children are running for local council.” At last she laughed and it finally sank it she was joking. I felt thick, slow and patronising, that I would believe such a thing.
I paid for the vegetables and I paid for the taxi to drop her home and take me to my flat. Local wages are so low, my per diem from my Australian benefactor was higher than her weekly wage.
We passed St Martin’s on the way. “They are mental in there,” the taxi driver said, tapping his forehead. When I didn’t respond he twisted to look at me, the steering wheel turning about so we veered across into traffic coming the other way. “Mental crazy,” he said. “Don’t go in there.”
He seemed chatty, so I asked him who he thought ‘that girl’ might be. He looked at me in the mirror.
“It might mean anything to anyone.”
“But what does it mean to you?”
“The same as it means to any taxi driver,” he said. “In the story she never gets old. Fresh-faced, sparkle-eyed, she smells of mangoes in season. Not the skin part, the flesh, chopped up and sweet on the plate. She picks up a taxi near the handicraft market in town. It’s always at 5:37. A lot of us won’t pick up a girl from there, then. She climbs into the backseat and gives you such a smile you feel you heart melt, all thought of your family gone.”
“Have you seen her?”
“No, but my brother has. She asks to go to the cemetery and if you pry and ask who is there, she will say, “My mother.” You want to take her home and feed her. You keep driving and you can’t help looking at her in the mirror because she is so beautiful. She wears no jewelry apart from a small pendant around her neck. It nestles just here.” He touched his breastbone with a forefinger, then spread his fingers as if holding a breast.
“I think that’s enough,” I said.
“The pendant has a picture of Krisna, fat baby eating butter. You turn the corner to reach the graveyard and you wait for her to tell you where to pull in. You feel a great coldness but the door is closed. You turn around and she is gone. Nothing of her remains.”
I shivered. It was an old story, true. But it frightened me.
Tax
i drivers love to tell stories of the things they’ve seen, the people they’ve picked up. I dismissed it as an urban myth, but I heard it again, and again. Always a brother, or a best friend, and they always told it with a shiver, as if it hurt to talk.
* * *
On my next visit to St Martins’ I walked up to the old lady, Malvika. “I am that girl,” she said. Between her breasts I saw a pendant, Krisna eating butter.
“You had a taxi ride?” I asked. “Is that right?”
“I . . .” She nodded.
“Will you walk with me? Let’s walk. I have sweets.” I whispered this last to her, not wanting the others to follow. All the women here walked slowly, their feet dragging on the floor, as if their feet were lead and they were too tired, too weak, to lift them each step. The women looked up at visitors but their eagerness was frightening. They wanted to tell you, give you their stories, and they wanted treats. Sweets to suck is mostly what they craved, sugar being the easiest addiction. Sugar ran out here because the women spooned it into their pockets, poked a wet finger in there during prayer or while they swept, then sucked that sugar off.
We walked across the driveway and around behind the art therapy room. I didn’t want to sit inside on the hard stools. It was dusty and it stank of bananas and sweat in the room. I wasn’t sure how I’d fix it but fix it I would have to. We found an old bench in the shade behind the building and sat down. “I told this many times,” Malvika said. “A hundred. Two hundred. They stopped writing it down.”
“I can write it down,” I said. I took out my sketchbook and I didn’t write; I drew.
“My mother died and father was happy to find a girlfriend the next day. He didn’t visit my mother’s grave but at least he gave me money for a taxi. I finished my job at 5:30 and went to see Mother before going home. There were not many taxis because everybody had finished work but this one stopped. This one.” She closed her eyes. I thought of the head nurse’s description of Malvika’s arrival and my heart started to beat. I didn’t need to hear this story; I would do nothing about it. But I wanted to hear it. I did . I wanted to hear of suffering and pain. I wanted to draw it on my paper, capture the detail of it.