The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (11 page)

Siân walked back from the edge onto the firmer terrain, found the Peirson headstone, and stood staring at it. She swayed a little on her feet, dopey with painkillers and antibiotics and the lingering aftereffects of anaesthetic. The marks on the ground where she'd hacked with her trowel were barely perceptible, like scratches from a dog's claws.

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something hurtling towards her, but before she could brace herself against the impact, she was knocked reeling. She didn't quite fall, though, and her assailant wasn't a car – it was Hadrian, bouncing back from her torso like an oversized soft toy thrown in a tantrum. While she was staggering and wind-milling her arms, he danced around her and offered woofs of encouragement.

A man's deep voice shouted ‘Hadrian, no!', just as Siân managed to steady herself against Thomas Peirson's headstone. Magnus leapt to her side, his hand extended, and she grasped hold of it, even though it wasn't strictly necessary now.

‘Christ, I'm sorry … !' said Mack. They stood locked in an absurd handshake over the graveplot, he dressed like a corporate businessman, she all in black like a Goth – the modern kind. Hadrian was bouncing up and down between them, panting and snuffling, and although his manic behaviour was annoying at first, it gave them a convenient excuse to let each other go.

‘Maybe he's desperate for exercise,' Siân suggested, fondling the dog's sumptuous flank with both hands. ‘Have you given up running?' And she aimed a nod at Mack's classically formal suit, the trousers of which were the kind she could imagine the wearer fastidiously inspecting for evidence of dog-hair. The memory of this man plastered with a dark arrowhead of sweat, scantily-clad in T-shirt and shorts, was difficult for her to retrieve now, so faded had it become.

‘It got a bit … unmanageable,' he said, jerking forward in an abortive attempt to assist her as, with a grunt of pain, Siân knelt next to Hadrian and started stroking the dog in earnest. ‘Hadrian wouldn't run with me anymore, you see. He'd just shoot ahead like a missile. Totally out of control.'

‘And this is what drove you to dress up like a sales executive for an insurance firm?'

But his appetite for sparring seemed to have deserted him; instead of firing off a witty rejoinder, he only winced.

‘I've got a meeting today, a conference,' he explained, his already rather pained eye-contact with her faltering. ‘In fact, I'm leaving. Leaving Whitby.'

‘Oh yes?' she said, after only a moment's pause in her stroking. ‘Going back to London?'

‘Yes.'

‘Research paper finished?'

‘Yes.'

‘Proved what you wanted to?'

He shrugged and looked down towards the town, in the general direction of the railway station. ‘That's for other researchers to decide.'

Siân had her arms around Hadrian's neck, her chin nudging his bony, downy skull. She waited a few more seconds to see if Mack would oblige her to ask, or if he'd have the courage to put her out of her suspense.

‘What's going to happen to Hadrian?' she enquired at last, in the silence of the headland.

Mack blushed crimson, an ugly inflammation from the roots of his hair to the collar of his creamy-white shirt. ‘I don't know. I'll take him with me, I suppose, but … I can't see myself being able to manage him in central London.' Sweat glistened on his great blushing forehead, and he began to stammer. ‘Still, he … he's a pure-bred, isn't he, and I'm sure he's worth a mint, so I expect there'll be … experts, you know, connoisseurs, who'd … ah … take him.'

‘How much do you want for him?' said Siân. She'd no doubt he would respond badly to this overture; braced herself for a shame-faced display of something horrible – craven retaliation, evasion, anger. She was wrong. He was enormously, unmistakably relieved.

‘Siân,' he declared, clapping a palm to his brow, ‘if you want him, you can
have
him.'

‘Don't be silly,' she said. ‘He's worth a mint, as you so …
bluntly
put it. How much do you want?'

Magnus smiled, shaking his head. ‘I've owned him long enough, Siân. Now I want
you
to have him as a gift – like those history books you dropped through my letterbox.'

‘Don't be patronising.'

‘No, no!' he protested, as animated and confident now as she'd ever seen him. ‘You don't understand – I was thinking of offering for ages! It's just that I … I didn't know where you lived – whether you'd be able to have a dog there. I had an idea you might be staying in a hotel …'

‘I might be,' she said. ‘But I could move somewhere else, if I wanted to. If there was a reason to.'
Yes, Yes, Yes
, she was thinking, hiding her daft grin of exultation inside the dark fur of Hadrian's back.
Mine, Mine, Mine
.

‘I just don't want you to be left,' Magnus was saying, ‘with the wrong impression of me, that's all. Like I didn't have a generous bone in my body …'

She giggled, hugging Hadrian tighter to keep a grip on her own hysteria, her own longing to weep and wail. The wound in her thigh was throbbing; she wondered if it had burst its stitches when she was staggering off-balance.

‘Don't want to go down in history misunderstood, eh?' she said.

With a flinch he acknowledged she'd scored a direct hit. ‘Yeah.'

Siân stood up, using Hadrian as a four-legged prop, which the dog seemed to understand instinctively. She noticed Mack cast a furtive glance at his watch; only now did she twig that he probably had a train to catch, and a roomful of people somewhere in London waiting to be impressed by a man in an immaculate suit.

‘I'm making you late, aren't I?'

‘Nothing a few grovelling apologies to a bunch of medical registrars won't fix.' And he enclosed one giant hand gently inside the other, in an attitude of prayer, bowing his head like a penitent monk. ‘
Mea culpa, mea culpa
.'

Time accelerated suddenly, as Siân realised this really was goodbye.

‘I'll have to return your confession,' she said. ‘And the bottle. Not through your letterbox, though.'

‘Don't worry about it,' he said wearily. ‘Keep it.'

‘It's worth a hell of a lot more than a Finnish Lapphund, you do realise that, don't you?'

Her attempt to speak his language missed its mark; he smiled ruefully and looked away. ‘Not to me. I liked it the way it was, before … before I understood it. When it was a mystery, a mysterious object my dad rescued from the ruins of Tin Ghaut when he was a kid. Something he'd take out to show me if I was good, and then put back in its special place.'

‘I'm sorry, Mack,' said Siân. ‘
Mea culpa
.'

‘It's OK,' he said breezily. ‘I'm sure you'll write an academic paper on it one of these days. Then you can thank me in the acknowledgements, eh?'

She stepped forward and embraced him, pressing her hands hard against his back. He responded decorously at first, then allowed himself to clasp her tight, uttering a deep and protracted sigh. He smelled of toothpaste, deodorant, aftershave and, very faintly, mothballs – a combination which somehow got past her defences and, despite her vow to avoid a melodrama, made her cry after all.

‘I don't even know your surname,' she said.

He groaned, and a hiccup of laughter passed through his breast into hers. ‘Boyle.'

‘Can't blame your father for that.'

‘And yours?'

She hugged him tighter, suppressing a tiny fear, left over from the nightmares, that his hand would cease stroking her hair and seize her by the throat. ‘It's a secret,' she said, and, pulling his head down to her lips, she whispered it in his ear.

When Mack was gone, Siân took shelter behind Thomas Peirson's gravestone and lifted her skirts to inspect her bandaged thigh. The gauze was clean and white, wholly devoid of the spreading stigma of blood she'd envisioned. Over-active imagination, as always.

Tentatively, she prodded the site of the surgery; it hurt less than before, and the pain was localised now, no longer a web of soreness throughout her innermost parts.

‘It seems you've been carrying a little chunk of Bosnia around with you for quite a few years,' the doctor had said, when the X-rays were ready. She'd been slow to catch on, assumed he was making some smug, oh-so-penetrating comment about her relationship with the past. All he meant was that a fragment of stone, ploughed deep into her flesh when the car was dragging her mangled body twenty yards across a street roughened by tanks, had managed to escape detection in the desperate attempts to mend her afterwards. Overworked military surgeons saved her life, did their damnedest to save her knee, were forced by monstrous swelling and infection to sacrifice it. Somehow, though, in all the drama, an embedded crumb of tarmac had been overlooked, and had spent all these years since, inching its way – millimetring its way, more like – to the surface.

‘That's not possible, surely?' Siân had said. But her conviction that she must be the eighth wonder of the world was gently undermined by medical statistics. The tendency of foreign objects to work their way out of people's bodies had been recorded, the doctor assured her, as far back as the Renaissance; there was, historically speaking, a lot of it about.

Siân stood at the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, fingering the morsel of rubble in her pocket, wondering if Magnus, running at the top speed that his suit and stiff black shoes allowed, had reached the railway station yet. She wondered how much older he might need to be, how much he might need to live through, before Time weathered him into the right man for her – counselling herself that he was sure to have found somebody else by then. The stone in her pocket was smooth as a pebble, as if her flesh had sucked it like a toffee for years, hoping to digest it. Over-active imagination again.

How odd to think that Whitby's sleepy harbour was twinkling here below her, obscured by a mushroom proliferation of typically English rooftops, while nestled inside her palm was a relic of a war-torn Balkan street thousands of miles away. She considered tossing it down the steps, just to see how long she could keep her eye on it before it became, irreclaimably, part of the British landscape. But, on balance, she preferred her original idea of getting a jeweller to fashion it into a pendant. A silver chain would be nice; Saint Hilda would have to forgive her.

She reached the abbey just as the last of the day's visitors were leaving. Homeward-bound American tourists looked at her in pity as she made her way towards the ruins; she wondered why, then realised they must think she'd just arrived on a late-running coach and was only going to get five minutes' worth of antiquity before being evicted by the English Heritage folks.

She walked to the sacristy and found the stone rectangle where Bobby and Jemima had shown off their superstitious spinning game. The vaguely human-shaped depression in the stone was, she had to admit, very inviting to lie in, even though its grey austerity had been tarnished by the words ‘I WAS HERE' graffiti'd in yellow felt-tip. Tomorrow, with pious diligence, those words would no doubt be erased.

Siân looked right and left, to confirm that the tourists were all gone, and then she balanced herself carefully on one foot and, after a deep breath, began to spin. Her intention was to spin thirty-four times, but physicalities got the better of ritual and she found herself deliriously dizzy after only ten. With the land and sky revolving before her eyes, she laid herself down in the stone hollow, settling her shoulders and head in the proper place. For what seemed like ages, the turrets and piers of the abbey moved to and fro on the turf of the East Cliff like giant sailing ships made of rock, then finally glided to a standstill. Up there on the buttresses, the ghostie woman not only failed to jump, but failed to appear.

Siân gasped in surprise as her cheek was touched by something rough and wet and rather disgusting; Hadrian was licking her. She opened her mouth to scold him, but his preposterous name stuck in her throat.

‘I think I'll call you Hush,' she said, elbowing herself up a little.

‘Hush,' he agreed, nudging her to get to her feet.

Read on for a preview of Michel Faber's

October 2014

1

Forty minutes later he was up in the sky

‘I was going to say something,’ he said.

‘So say it,’ she said.

He was quiet, keeping his eyes on the road. In the darkness of the city’s outskirts, there was nothing to see except the tail-lights of other cars in the distance, the endless unfurling roll of tarmac, the giant utilitarian fixtures of the motorway.

‘God may be disappointed in me for even thinking it,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘He knows already, so you may as well tell me.’