The Devil's Staircase (13 page)

Celia had always been a determined person. She’d walked before her fellow nursery babies had. She’d refused the bottle till she was two. She’d never eaten cauliflower. And the births of both boys had been homers, agonising, drug-free, in-the-bath homers. She never gave up on anything – not when Greg said he wasn’t sure about having kids, or when Johnny refused to say thank you, or when Sam declared that he never wanted to ride a bike anyway, ever. Throughout her life, Celia had achieved all the goals she set herself.

But after weeks of keeping her goal-achieving head on, despite the worst, most awful scenario imaginable, Celia was beginning to realise that on this occasion, she would have to give up.

It had been about ten nights since the people moved in above – she didn’t know exactly how long, because at least one of the changes from light to dark had eluded her – and she had tried everything. She’d used all her mental energy, all her physical reserves, and was now realising that it was time to surrender. She would die. She would never see Greg or Johnny or Sam again. They would never find her body, never know that she had been kidnapped just outside their house, then taken away, beaten, raped and starved. It would be better to die, she thought, as she sat in her chair at the foot of the staircase.

She was in the stinking hall again when she heard a tap running. There must be a bathroom beside the girl’s bedroom, she thought to herself. She followed the noise down the wall where it swished down through a pipe. She moved over to the pipe and banged at it with her hands. Good solid bangs that she was proud of. She kept going until she heard a noise from the bathroom – the girl again. A noise and then feet and then silence. Celia moved her chair towards the bicycle chain in the main room. She could use this to make a louder noise. She had almost reached it when the footsteps returned and Celia heard water gushing down the pipe. The girl was emptying the bath, and Celia was in the wrong position to bang at the pipe. By the time she’d zigzagged back over, the girl had gone.

For a long time, Celia bashed at the pipe with her chain. Its echo gave her a better chance, she figured. But nothing came of it except more blood from her shredded hands.

Hours later, in her chair-prison, Celia lowered her head to begin dying. She may as well do it there. Why move? Why do anything?

Meow.

Maybe this was heaven, Celia thought.

Meow.

Bobby was going to greet her in heaven. Maybe the boys would be there too?

Meow.

She opened her eyes. She was still in hell.

Meow.

Bobby was in hell?

‘Bobby?’ She looked around the square hallway – there it was again. She followed the noise as fast as she could, moving a couple of inches at a time before getting back into
her
room.

Bobby was meowing at the grate. Oh God, Bobby.

She edged her way over to the wall and looked up at her cat. He’d found her. How? As she stared into his eyes, she reasoned that she mustn’t be very far from home.

The grate was about a foot wide and ten inches high. A couple of the metal slats were missing, and Bobby was able to stick his head in. But he couldn’t squeeze the rest of himself through, as much as he seemed to want to. He kept meowing at Celia, pushing himself this way and that.

Come on Bobs, come on, she thought to herself, stretching her tied hands as far as she could until they were less than a foot from his head.

He seemed to stop. Was he stuck? She hoped he was, and that he would meow so loudly that a neighbour would hear. ‘
Meow!
Bobby, meow!’ she tried to say with her eyes. Someone might come and find you, find me.

But he didn’t meow and he wasn’t stuck. He was performing cat magic, manipulating his body without seeming to move, then plunging down to her feet with a whoosh. Two slats from the grate fell, one of them onto Celia’s lap, which she clutched with a new-found instinct to gather tools and weapons. The second slat missed Bobby by an inch and landed on the floor as he jumped up to her.

Celia touched him, bent down to feel him with her face. She scoured the room, thinking hard, breathing loudly through her nose, and then it came to her. Her locket – a silver heart with an unreachable photo of her boys inside. It wasn’t so hard to take it off now that her hands were in front of her, and she could wriggle her fingers a little. She wondered why she’d not thought of a use for it earlier. Although, she thought fleetingly, she would probably have used it to try and kill herself, and she was glad now that she hadn’t.

She placed the silver chain and heart-shaped locket around Bobby’s neck. She then lifted him as high as she could in her tied, twisted hands. He pounced a foot into the air, meowing loudly and clearing the opening easily now that all but one of the metal slats were missing. He ran off with his message.

She couldn’t believe her luck. Bobby would take the locket home and they would follow him back, just like Lassie.

Distant sirens fizzled with her heartbeat. Voices wafted through the grate and out again, a bark and a wheelie bin lid, footsteps, taps and doors. It was an award-winning solution, and she had been elated for some time, but as the voices and the sounds of the doors faded, she realised that Bobby was just a damn cat, not a particularly cunning one at that, who had probably dropped the locket in the back lane and then skulked off to lick himself somewhere. She found some voice in her throat to moan and she lowered her head to look for comfort in it.

A song. Celia stopped the moan, lifted her head, and listened. A Beatles number, with the perfect lyrics coming from above the grate. She zigzagged until she was directly underneath the music and reached with the metal slat that had fallen into her lap as high as she could in order to jab at the low ceiling. She stretched and stretched herself until the one-foot piece of metal was a quarter of an inch from the roof. She couldn’t reach. She tried to make the chair jump but each time she did, the metal slat in her outstretched hand failed to make contact. Fuck, she thought, holding the slat as tightly as she could. The girl was playing the song for the fourth time. She would stop soon, surely. She had to make this one work. She steadied herself, stretched her hand, and jumped.

Help me!

She’d made contact! The chair thumped back to the floor.

Help me!

She’d honestly expected the footsteps to be the police. It was still light. He never came when it was light. This had to be the police, or the girl, at last. But why were they being so careful? Why were seventeen cars not screeching to a halt around the building, their contents spilling out, surrounding, taking aim, storming, then saving her?

It wasn’t the police. It was him. He had Bobby in his arms. ‘Very creative,’ he said, toying with the necklace.

Bobby hissed and lashed at his captor’s hand.

‘Ow!’ said the masked man, throwing the cat down and nursing his scratched wrist. Bobby immediately rushed over to his owner, and curled into her naked lap. Celia moaned as she put her hands on him, more so as the man approached and snatched the cat from her. Celia reached with her tied hands to stop him. The cat screeched, desperate to get away. Kneeling on the floor, the man held Bobby between his knees, while roughly knotting the locket-chain around his neck. He smiled at Celia’s pleading eyes, then stood up with Bobby in his hands. He lifted the cat high . . . and let go. Bobby wriggled as the noose strangled him, his paws dangling just an inch from the floor. The man waited for the movement to subside, as if holding a spinning yo-yo. Afterwards, just to make a point, the man pulled at the chain-knot until the cat’s head severed and flopped onto the ground.

It was getting tiresome. He would have to kill her now. This was annoying because killing wasn’t particularly his thing, but she was in no state to go out alive and she’d heard him speak too much, knew his voice. He could do it and leave her with the others. If no one had found them yet, no one ever would. But he had somewhere to go. In fact, he was late.

‘I’m going to kill you tomorrow,’ he said, leaving Celia and the pieces of her cat in their joint grave.

When he left, he forgot to turn off the light.

Oh God. She shut her eyes tightly and turned from the decapitated cat, staying in that position till it was dark outside, not looking, not moving. Eventually she noticed that a light was shining in her eyes. And it was smelly. She squinted at the bulb in the corner of the room. The light was white and sharp. Too strong . . . 100 watts – her eyes had adjusted and she could now read it on the bulb. The inner white lining of the orange lampshade was being tinged brown from the heat.

She moved over to the lampshade. The edges of the bandanna that gagged her mouth were loose and flimsy, the perfect kindling. She began heating the loose ends. Steam rose from the evaporating drain water. Bending over the hot bulb, the polyester warmed itself and before long it was smoking. Her intention was to weaken the material, burn a bit of it, so that it might come undone, but when it began smoking she realised it could also act as a signal. She moved her head from side to side, giving oxygen, making the smoke rise, and soon the room was thick with smoke . . . and her hair was on fire.

She yelled through the flaming cloth and banged her head against her shoulder and then against the lamp, which smashed to pieces on the floor, and then against the wall until the fire was out. She smouldered for a few seconds, before realising that this, her last and most horrific project, had not worked. Not only that, it had burnt the hair from her head, and some of the skin from her face.

As the endorphins raced to her injuries, Celia realised that this was the end. She nodded to herself – she would finish herself off before he arrived to kill her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of doing it. It would be on her terms. She scoured the room for tools – the smashed and useless lamp, the metal table, the locket, the bicycle chain, the dead cat, the metal slats that had fallen from the grate, the bucket, the chair, the table, the drainpipe. There were many options – broken lamp to wrists, bicycle chain to neck. In the end she decided she would do what her uncle Mark had done with his unwanted puppies. She would smash her head against the wall. This way, at least, she would be expressing exactly how she felt about having to kill herself . . . Because in truth, it really fucking pissed her off.

She would begin the following day. Until then, she would give herself a wake. She would reflect on her mostly blessed life, think about her Mum and her Dad, her big brother, about Johnny’s curly hair and Sam’s perfect grammar and neat handwriting, about the conversation she and Greg would often have, which always started with him asking:

Who loves you?

You do.

Why?

Because I’m lovable.

Why?

Because God made me that way.

It stopped. By the time Fliss had responded to my scream of ‘
Fire!’
and raced into my room, the smoke had disappeared. Like magic.