The Devil's Staircase

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘Did you get hurt?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The only guy before last April?’

  ‘Never you mind. Just keep perspective . . .Take this . . .’ She popped a small white pill into my mouth . . .‘and forget all about him.’

  At three in the morning I found myself in the Polish club across the road, a tiny bar in the basement of a B&B, with a pool table, a bar, and some elderly Poles who I loved with every fibre of my being. They were warm and caring and had very large glasses, all four of them, and I told them so as I sat with them at the bar. Very large glasses that seemed to magnify the pain they had obviously suffered in their tragic lives.

  Fliss grabbed me from the bar. ‘You’re scaring them,’ she said. ‘Your face is getting too close, you’re grinding your teeth and your mouth’s so dry it’s making a clicking sound. Have some water.’

  I drank a large bottle of Evian and swirled around the small basement room to discover amazing facts about my new friends: Cheryl-Anne ate the shells of peanuts, Zach’s sister hadn’t been in touch since she’d stayed at the Royal three months ago, Fliss wore no underpants even with skirts.

  ‘BRONWYN! BRONWYN!’

  I opened my eyes to Fliss, who was pouring the rest of a large bottle of Evian on my face.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘But it’s incredible. So many interesting people in one tiny little room. It’s like a micro-thingmy. And there’s Francesco, coming in the door to get me. Francesco! My eyes are open and looking up!’

  The next time I opened my eyes the sun was shining through the window of my hostel room. My head ached. I sat up and grabbed the bottle of water beside my bed, but it was empty, so I got out of bed and went to the bathroom.

  ‘Hi Cheryl-Anne,’ I said. She was sprawled in the bath. I somehow managed to fill my bottle without looking at her too much, but I have to admit that I did notice the caesarean scar across her stomach. I’d only ever seen Cheryl-Anne shit-faced or hung-over, and I wasn’t sure which was worse: her obnoxious right-wing arguments incongruously coupled with an inevitable shedding of clothes, or the smells that came from her birdcage mouth the following morning.

  ‘Hi honey, are you okay?’

  ‘Fine, just a sore head, that’s all.’

  I walked out of the bathroom, breathed in some only slightly fresher air, and went downstairs to Francesco’s room. I remembered seeing him at the club, but nothing much else, except that I was out of my head on drugs and had freaked out because he’d left me in the garden. I was new to relationship etiquette, much like aeroplane etiquette, and now that I was sober and drug-free it dawned on me that maybe couples didn’t see each other every day. Maybe they spent alternate days together, to save it up or something.

  I knocked on Francesco’s door. There was no response. I knocked again. But he didn’t answer.

  Back in my room I received the second of Fliss’s lessons. Apparently, I was showing an off-putting amount of keenness, which was verging on neediness. Also, I was honing in too soon, ‘on a guy who should really shave his balls.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  Obviously, teachers don’t have to answer pupils.

  ‘You must learn to view men as sexual objects,’ Fliss said. ‘You don’t need to like them.’ With this, she handed me some clean clothes and the class was dismissed.

  An hour later, I walked down Queensway to the Porchester Centre. The building was Art Deco, with a gym and a pool in the main section, and the steam rooms in another. The pool and steam rooms had separate entrances and receptions but were connected by an internal door. I waited in the office at the top of the swimming pool until Pete, the heavyweight I’d met at the party in the hostel, came in to greet me. I hadn’t noticed when I met him, but he looked a bit like a young Bruce Willis.

  ‘Well, well, Bronwyn Kelly . . .’

  ‘Hi Pete.’

  Pete told me about the job I’d seen advertised in the local paper. This was my second interview ever, and I wasn’t very good at it. I fidgeted most of the time, shifting my leg about nervously, worrying that he might ask me what they’d asked me at the Craigieburn Mint and that I would once again answer honestly:

  ‘Why should we give you this job?’ the twenty-three-yearold Mint-manager-man had asked.

  ‘Because I have no ambition and no particular skills.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want me to be contented filing bits of paper eight hours a day, five days a week. For this, a candidate must be uninspired and robotic. I have these qualities. I am the person you are looking for.’

  My Dad had phoned afterwards to explain to the twentythree-year-old son of his friend (good old nepotism was alive and well) that I had an odd sense of humour, but really did have a burning drive to file invoices at the Craigieburn Mint.

  Lo and behold, Pete asked much the same thing, but I was prepared this time.

  ‘Working in such a beautiful building would be great,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be cleaning the hair out of drains.’

  I looked like shit, even with Fliss’s clothes on. My eyes were red, my clothes were too tight, I was exhausted from falling head over heels in love, and I was coming down from skunk and ‘e’.

  ‘It would be my privilege to clean the hair out of drains,’ I said.

  ‘Then congratulations.’

  I smiled slightly then ventured, ‘My first pay . . .?’

  ‘Three weeks, I’m afraid. Can you start tomorrow? It’s ladies’ day. You’d be on late shift – three till ten.’

  5

  That night I lost my shoe. The left one. An Asics special my Dad had bought in case I changed my mind about joining the St Patrick’s netball team again. I hadn’t changed my mind, but I loved those runners.

  ‘Bugger!’ I said as the shoe fell from the roof and into a huge black bin at the front of the hostel.

  ‘Shhh!’ Fliss hissed, as she prised open the attic window of the house next to the hostel. My eyes were half-shut and I was crawling a centimetre at a time, trying desperately not to look down. If I looked down, I thought, I would lose my footing and end up splashed all over the pavement.

  I followed Fliss in through the window awkwardly, and found myself standing next to her in a dusty attic room. We tiptoed slowly down the narrow stairs to the second-floor landing, and beheld the glorious interior of a huge Georgian townhouse. The stairs were circular, winding all the way down to ground-floor level. On each floor, at least five rooms spider-legged from a rectangular landing. We followed the steps down past the second floor, the first, and then to ground-floor level. There was no one there, just as we’d expected.

  James the New Zealander had cleaned the house, he’d told Fliss. Not long after the clean, the owner had gone bust, and the house had been repossessed. I hadn’t known anything about squatting, and was amazed when Fliss told me that we had the right to live in the vacant house, as long as we didn’t break anything to get in. They could evict us, of course, but not with physical force, so we could change the locks and stay till the legal process was complete, which could take weeks.

  And what a squat this was – gorgeous and huge. No guilt about the bankrupt owner whatsoever, and no hassles from the bank, which hadn’t even bothered to try and sell it yet.

  I looked up to the top floor, which was capped by a huge stained glass dome. It was absolutely beautiful.

  We opened the front door and let Ray in. He was the Jo’burg locksmith who’d masterminded the break-in. He’d been waiting inconspicuously on the steps of the Royal next door. ‘One at each end of the street,’ he ordered us. ‘Whistle if someone dodgy’s coming.’

  We walked to opposite ends of the street and did as we were told, but no one dodgy walked past, just a few backpackers, and anyway, Ray looked so nonchalant as he changed the locks to the front door that no one would’ve batted an eyelid.

  He whistled half an hour later and Fliss and I raced towards each other and then into th
e house. After we shut the door behind us, we screeched and hugged. We had a huge, wonderful house. And it was absolutely free.

  After Ray had finished changing the back door lock and given us our keys, we chose our rooms. I picked the one overlooking the garden on the ground floor. It was large and sunny, with a view onto the small walled patch of grass at the back, and there was a bathroom next door. Fliss took the biggest room at the front of the first floor, and Ray chose one of the rooms on the second floor.

  We spent hours searching the endless number of hotel skips and eventually found an old sofa, discarded mattresses, a table, five chairs, a small television and a microwave. Everyone had sleeping bags but me, so I borrowed one from Hamish. We made a coffee table out of bricks and wood and before we knew it, we had beds, a dining room, a living room, and a house filled with all the ex-pats in Bayswater.

  I got very drunk on cider. I whirled around in circles singing to the Violent Femmes, which was coming from some girl’s Ipod doc. Despite my furious whirling, every-thing made sense, especially the music. Nice, nice people. Nice, nice squat. Nice, nice drink of lemonade.

  I swapped clothes with Hamish my computer man, surprised that, actually, I looked pretty much the same in his jeans and T-shirt as I had in mine.

  Then I went next door to the Royal. Francesco wasn’t talking to me. He was doing the books, refusing to come to the door, so I buzzed and buzzed till some jet-lagged new arrival came downstairs and opened it for him. I stood at reception and pouted my lip, hoping this would be cute enough to break the ice.

  ‘You’re so selfish,’ he said to me from his paper-strewn desk. ‘I can’t even look at you.’

  Unsurprisingly, the pouting hadn’t worked. Not only had I broken my promise not to break into the squat, I’d also jeopardised his job by going in via the roof of his hostel.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sobering up suddenly.

  He ignored me, so I went outside to think and after a few minutes I rang the bell again. The aforementioned new arrival came down the stairs, opened the door and said in his South African accent: ‘Stop ringing the fucking bell.’

  I told Francesco I didn’t want to demonstrate an unattractive amount of keenness.

  ‘I’m not needy, honestly,’ I said. ‘I just think you’re really wonderful.’

  He flicked me away with a shake of the head and no eye contact.

  Reluctantly I went outside again. Shit, I was needy, wasn’t I? Fliss would never give me a gold star at this rate.

  I was thinking I should play hard to get for a bit, maybe even ignore him, when two men in suits walked towards me then stopped.

  ‘We’ll give you six weeks,’ one of the men said. ‘Sound fair?’

  I looked around, wondering if they had meant to address someone else.

  ‘If it doesn’t, there’s always Plan B.’

  I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out, just a kind of groan, then luckily another voice spoke for me. ‘Very fair.’

  Pete from the Porchester Centre had come out of the party and was standing behind me.

  The men nodded, then left.

  ‘I want the big room above yours,’ Pete said.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Bank, I guess. Bloody reasonable. If it was my house, I’d go straight to Plan B.’

  Pete turned to walk away.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the park,’ he said.

  I watched his large muscular figure fade into the street. I wouldn’t want to bump into him in the dark, I thought to myself.

  As he passed the huge council bin in front of the hostel, I remembered my shoe. I’d been wearing Fliss’s pumps all day and my feet were killing me. I ran to the bin and looked inside. It was huge and dark and filled with exceptionally smelly things. I reached down and my hand touched something sticky. Then I noticed it – a runner. It was right in the middle. Too far to reach from where I was, so I hauled myself up, my stomach leaning over the edge of the bin, and reached in . . . closer, almost . . . I could feel it . . . I got it!

  I raced up the front steps to the squat and felt my pocket for my keys, but realised I still had Hamish’s frighteningly snug jeans on. Cheryl-Anne and Fliss opened the door – topless. I squirmed, covered my eyes as I walked past them, and went to bed.

  The following morning, when I tried to put the shoe on, I noticed it wasn’t mine.

  6

  The shoe was blue, size five, Nike and for the right foot. Bronny squeezed it on anyway then raced to Fliss’s room on the first floor to find her skinny friend lying naked beside two men who were equally naked. She looked away, scavenged a T-shirt and a pair of jeans from the floor, and then raced out of the house.

  She was five minutes late and Esther – the steam room dinosaur – wasn’t happy. So unhappy, in fact, that out of pure badness she gave Bronny a size 18 netball skirt and a size 18 polo shirt. Bronny looked hilarious in two right trainers of different makes and colours, a skirt that continually fell to the floor, and a T-shirt so large it was hard to spot her in it.

  Esther had worked in the steam rooms for over thirty years. She was fifty-nine, thin and crinkly. She never smiled and never had reason to, because no one liked her, not even her successful children. She acted like she owned the joint – watched staff like a hawk, especially the Australians. But she needed to watch them. They took illegal drugs and had sexual orgies. For some time, Esther had taken it upon herself to rid the Porchester of such vermin, or if not, to at least make their lives miserable.

  While checking for signs of drug-taking and promiscuity, Esther showed Bronny the ropes – give towel, take towel, check lockers, clean floors, clean tiles, clean drains – and surmised after half an hour that this young hussy was no different from all the others.

  ‘You have to be fully qualified to touch this,’ Esther said, opening a small metal cabinet. She explained that the cabinet housed the sauna and steam controls as well as several keys to several important rooms. She took a key from one of the hooks, and opened the cleaning cupboard adjacent to the cabinet. Inside the cupboard were tins of cleaning fluids and rat poisons, and a cardboard box filled with lost property.

  ‘God, are there rats down here?’ Bronny asked.

  ‘Not if we use this stuff. But you’re not allowed!’ Esther reminded her. ‘You have to be a fully trained staff member.’

  ‘What are those?’ Bronny pointed to two large straw bundles, tied together stiffly like a broom.

  ‘They’re for schmeissing.’

  ‘Schmeissing?’

  ‘Some of the men smack each other with them, in the steam rooms. They’re not allowed. These were confiscated the last men’s day.’

  Esther’s eyes turned to slits as she stared at Bronny for a few awkward seconds. ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’ Bronny asked.

  The Australian had ideas, Esther could tell. From the look in her puppy dog eyes, she could sense the girl might be beating a lesbian heroin addict friend with a makeshift straw stick that very night.

  Throughout her first shift, Bronny’s determination to avoid the viewing of private parts was commendable, despite the fact that every woman in the spa was naked. She cast her eyes to the floor in the steam rooms, to the ceiling beside the relaxation beds, to the left as she walked down the stairs by the plunge pool. At the towel dispensary area, she found that closed was the best eye position, but once, when she opened them to answer a question from her towel dispensary seat, she found herself directly opposite a vagina. She gasped, threw the customer a towel, then quickly closed them again.

  This was not a friendly environment, Bronny realised. Customers were determined to relax, relax, relax, oblivious to staff, definitely not in need of chit-chat. Apart from Esther, there were only two other staff members on ladies’ days: Kate, a naked part-timer and staunch supporter of Esther, and Mitt-woman.

  Mitt-woman never left the body-scrub room, a square spac
e downstairs opposite the showers, where naked customers offered themselves to her concrete slab as if already in the morgue. Her thin body was always clad in running shorts and a singlet. She was around thirty, had curly hair, a constant grimace, and large mitts which she used to rub her customers raw, their skin falling to the floor like snow, then dampening into a thick dark coating of skin sludge. Mitt-woman never spoke. Her exfoliating gloves said it all.

  At 10 o’clock that night, Bronny went home to her huge house. Her keys had been lost since the whole jeans-swapping saga, so she knocked on the door and waited for one of the stoned residents to let her in. In the living room were seven other stoned faces, including the newly recruited residents – Porchester Pete, Caesarian Cheryl-Anne and Guitar Zach.

  Cheryl-Anne had taken her T-shirt off and was looking at something in the middle distance. Fliss was sitting opposite Zach in her miniskirt. Zach had stopped playing Believe because he realised he could see what Fliss ‘hadn’t had for breakfast.’

  Bronny was hung-over and exhausted, but her vow to live was an enduring one, so she somehow mustered the energy to partake in the bucket bong and in the lengthy conversation about what the conversation was about.

  The dream woke her at three in the morning. She was in Station Street, Kilburn. Her 70s brown brick house was in its rightful position in the middle of the street. The disused railway, where old Mr Todd kept his horses, was at one end, and the bacon factory was at the other. The surroundings had once seemed normal to Bronny – the squealing sound of pigs being slaughtered at night; Mr Todd sleeping on the ground in his dusty Driza-Bone. But in her dream, none of it seemed normal. She was running past the old railway, and Mr Todd was spookily clean, ghost-like, standing by his horses and staring at her. She was running past the bacon factory and the pigs weren’t screeching, just walking slowly into the slaughterhouse. Her leaps were increasing in size as she ran, so that eventually she was bounding into the air, getting higher and higher. And just when she should have arrived home, she leapt right over and missed the house altogether, landing on the other side of it. She jumped back again, but landed even further away. Ursula was waiting on the veranda, but after a while Bronny’s leaps were so large and high that she could hardly see Ursula at all.