Chương 55: The Stairwell

Abe let the world in on the sidewalk outside his own block at nine o'clock on New Year's Eve, and the noise nearly took his head off. He'd forgotten what a street sounds like. There was music coming out of a window on the third floor. A car went past with its window down, and somebody two blocks over was already setting off the cheap fireworks you buy at the Longmarket in a bag of ten. He stood there with his bag on his shoulder and let all of it happen at him. Then he went in, and the stairwell was full.

Every door on every landing stood open, the way they did on the thirty first, and Mrs. Bewley was cutting a cake with a bread knife on the second-floor landing. Abe got four steps up before the first person grabbed him.

"He's alive," said Peg, from the doorway of the Bewleys' apartment, with a glass in her hand. She was standing with two women. One was Marge from the school kitchens. One was a total stranger, and all three had the face people get when they have been laughing at the same thing for most of the night.

"I've been in and out all week," Abe said.

"You've been a rumor all week." Peg pointed at him with the glass.

"Marge, this is the nephew. He's very busy and very important and he's got shoulders on him now, look at that."

"Peg," Abe said.

"I'm allowed. It's New Year." She drank some of it.

"Go on, before Colin's lot get to the sausage rolls." Abe went up two more steps and stopped, because he was working out what had just happened. His aunt was at a party. She had a drink in her hand and two women he had never seen her stand next to. She had been having a good time in this building all evening while he was standing in brown water forty miles north of it. He had genuinely not known she did this. Marge came up two steps after him with her glass.

"Is it true what she's been telling everybody? About the school board?"

"Probably," Abe said.

"She's told this building four times. Twice to me." Marge looked at his shoes, then at his shoulders, then back at his shoes.

"You don't look like it."

"He doesn't, does he," said Peg, delighted. Colin from the ground floor leaned over the rail to find out who they were shouting about.

"It's Peg's Abe," Mrs. Bewley shouted up at him, with the bread knife still in her hand.

"He's top of that board at the school. Top of the whole school, Colin." Colin always knew when a kettle was about to boil, anywhere in the building, through two floors, and that was all the Weave had ever given him. So Abe stood on his own stairs and let a building full of people who had known him since he was four be pleased about him. He had expected that to be awful. He loved it.

A man caught him on the half landing between two and three and got a hand around his shoulder and shook him about, pleased as anything.

"There he is. I said you'd be in for the bells or Peg would skin you. Look at the state of you." The hand was on the shoulder a stilt had opened. Abe waited for it to hurt, and it did not, because that had closed up weeks ago in a field nobody in this building had ever heard of. He knew everything about this man. He knew the gray van with the sliding door that stuck, and the cough you could hear on the stairs in the mornings.

He knew that for a month after their mother died, that van took him and June to school every morning, and nobody ever asked it to. He went to say the name and it was not there. Being stuck on a word has an edge you can feel around. This had no edge. There was nothing in the place where the name went. He said "Hiya" twice and something about school starting Monday, and the man laughed and went off down the stairs with a plate. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent.

Report any appearances on Amazon. Peg handed it back to him twenty minutes later without knowing she was doing it.

"Ray's asking if you want his ladder for the window," she said, going past with a bowl.

"Say yes, or he'll only ask again." Ray. Ray Garbutt. It arrived complete the second she said it. It had never been anywhere, and having it handed to him was worse than not having it. Ada Bewley came out of her mother's apartment with a plate of cake and put it on the folding table, going around people without touching anybody.

"You're back," she said.

"I'm back."

"Are you on the hill in the morning? Before it's light. I told you about it." She had. She'd told him on the last day of term, mid-stretch, looking at the ceiling. Abe had thought about it twice since then, and not once in the last two months.

"I'll try," he said.

"You'll sleep in," said Ada. Then she stopped where she was, halfway back to her mother's door, and turned around. Ada had worked her holds at the other end of that hall, forty feet away, every evening of the last week of term. She had given him one rule on the first night, out loud, in the doorway. He did not help her and she did not ask him anything. She had watched him run the form end to end at speed. She knew what that used to look like.

"What have you been doing," she said. It did not go up at the end. Abe said "Training," and Ada went on looking at him after he had finished saying it. Then Colin got to the folding table with a lot to say about the cake, and when Abe looked again Ada had gone, and that was that. He put a hand on the rail and made himself add it up properly, because nobody else was ever going to do it for him.

Fifteen days on the floor of a school hall in Prescot, and he could still tell you which board he had slept on and what it smelled like. Then the tins, and then the marsh, and the marsh had gone on long enough that he had stopped counting it. Two months of his own since Monday morning, and out here it was still the same week. He had paid for the wheel in tiredness, and in food, and in other people's stockrooms. Every one of those bills had come with a number on it and he had looked at every number.

This one had no number on it anywhere, and nothing had come and taken anything. He had simply been away for two months, and things two months back are further off than things from last week, and he'd have gone on not noticing if a man hadn't put a hand on his shoulder. He thought about the screens he hadn't looked at in days. His still-hours were all Body work now. He'd let the settle go rote weeks ago, and rote pays nothing, so that bar had not moved and was not going to move before Monday.

Nothing on any screen he owned was going to change between now and the board. He found that he did not care about it at all. Peg came and stood next to him on the rail at about ten to twelve, and she had had enough to drink to say something she would not have said sober.

"You're never in this house," she said. She was looking down the stairwell and not at him, and she said it lightly, like a joke that has been sitting around a while.

"I'm in it now," Abe said.

"You're in it now." She put her hand flat on the back of his head for a second, which she had not done since he was about twelve.

"In and out, all hours, and a bag on your shoulder, and I get told about it after. Your mother did that." Abe had no idea what to do with the last four words, and Peg did not seem to want anything done with them. She took her hand off his head and went back to Marge, and nobody else in that building said anything like it to him all night. At midnight the whole stairwell counted down and got it wrong, because the kids on the fourth floor started three seconds early and everybody just went with them.

Then there was shouting, and the fireworks over the docks. Colin from the ground floor sang the first line of the song extremely loudly and turned out not to know the second line. Mrs. Bewley kissed Abe on the side of the head and told him he was too thin. Marge said something to Peg that Abe didn't hear, and Peg laughed so hard she had to put her glass down on the stairs. It was the most ordinary night in the world, and every single person in that building was having it at the same time.

Abe stood in the middle of the noise and was happy. Properly happy, for the first time since Christmas Day. Then June came up the stairs. She had her coat on over her pajama top and her hair up. She was coming up from the ground floor two at a time, which she was not supposed to do and did anyway. She had a paper hat on. She had gotten it from somewhere in the last ten minutes.

"Colin's been singing," she said, from four steps down.

"He doesn't know the second line. He's never known the second line. Peg says he's been not knowing it since before either of us was born." She got to the landing still going.

"And somebody finally opened the shortbread tin. Guess what was in it. Go on, guess. Shortbread. What else was it ever going to be." Abe watched June come up toward him and had a small, cold, completely silly moment where he could not place her. He knew everything about her. He liked her enormously. He could not have told anybody standing on those stairs that she was his sister. Then it went. Then it was June, obviously it was June, it had never been anything else.

She got to the landing and put the paper hat on his head and pulled the elastic down under his chin hard enough to sting.

"Happy New Year," she said.

"Did you ask her?"

"Ask her what," said Abe. He heard it come out of his mouth and he watched it land. June's face stopped moving. She looked at the paper hat on his head, and then back at him.

"Saturdays," she said.

"You said Wednesday. It's Wednesday." Abe tried to remember Monday, and what came back was the room. He had the pie, and his wet hair, and Peg's back at the counter. Not one word anybody had said at that table came with it. He had sat there on Monday and told her Wednesday, and out here that was two days ago. Inside him it was the far end of a marsh forty miles north, two months back, and a boy on a hummock who had stopped counting.

"Trevor," Abe said.

"Yeah," said June.

"Trevor." She took the paper hat off his head and put it on her own and went up past him toward the fourth floor, and she did not slam anything on the way. Peg was in the Bewleys' doorway with her glass, and she had watched the whole thing happen.

"She'll get over it," Peg said, when he got up level with her.

"She didn't speak to me for two days in November over a hairbrush." Then she went back in to Marge, pleased with herself. Abe stayed where he was on the landing and started going back through the week, to find out what else he had lost.