The Devil's Staircase (5 page)

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.

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 space 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.

Waking in a terrified sweat, she got up from her mattress and went to the small bathroom beside her bedroom. The house was quiet – everyone had either gone to bed or fallen asleep in the living room. She turned the tap on and drank some water, splashed her face, had a pee, then walked through the hall and back towards her bedroom. She hadn’t noticed before, but there was a door in the hall under the stairs. She tried to open it, but it was locked.

She couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just the residue of her nightmare. It was Francesco. She couldn’t have been making it up, could she? The chemistry? How well they’d gotten on? She longed for him so badly, but now he hated her, and she didn’t blame him. He’d specifically asked her not to break into the squat, and she’d ignored him.

Drifting off at around seven, the dream resumed where it had left off. Bronny could make out Ursula
and
her Dad. They were waiting for her on the veranda, but they diminished as her leaps increased. The fear woke her at the same time as a noise. A scrape, then another scrape. She sat up in her mattress, looked out into the small garden, then out towards the hall. At first she wondered if it had been the dream – the pigs, screeching at night, perhaps. She got up and walked into the living room, but the only noise was Ray’s open-mouthed snore – he’d obviously fallen asleep in front of the television.