The Devil's Staircase (4 page)

A few hours later Francesco and I shared a joint in the small garden at the back of the Royal.

‘Promise me you won’t do it,’ he said after I’d told him about the squat. ‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

I lay down on the paving stones and looked at the sky. It was weird not seeing the stars of my world. Unbelievable, really. And as I gazed at the North Star, I thought of Kilburn, the place I’d practically died in four years earlier, where I may have died all over again if I’d stayed. I thought of Ursula – school Dux, distinctions so far at uni, beautiful, but serious and oblivious to boys.

‘Boys are boring,’ she had asserted through her teenage years, and then, through uni: ‘It’s not on my agenda. I need to concentrate. And if I’m ever ready, he’d have to be unusual . . . compelling . . . He doesn’t exist.’

She was a swot, burying herself in science and then medicine, and a loner, who adored the most frightening aspects of the Australian countryside – the killer wildlife and the killer weather.

I thought of Dad, fifty-three now, with hair as dark and as thick as it ever was. An engineer, whose extreme energy and love of working things out was plain to see: in chook sheds, rockeries and his home-bottled apricots. I couldn’t picture what the lino on our kitchen floor looked like, because it had always been covered in the parts of our ‘temperamental’ dishwasher. I thought how frustrating it must have been for Mum and Dad – the GP and the engineer – the fixer of people and the fixer of things – to end up with an unfixable family.

Ursula and Dad were on the other side of the world, waking to fresh eggs and parrots. I found myself kissing my hand and blowing it to the sky.

I’d been looking forward to being with Francesco all day. I’d listened intently to Fliss’s advice and had decided that I should take steps towards the whole cherry-taking procedure. By the end of this date, I’d resolved, my eye position should be open and looking up. I wasn’t sure how to start if off, though, and a logistical panic stirred in me. I knew a friend who’d actually blown on the man’s penis for five minutes, puffing air at it as if it was a birthday cake before he suggested she take a piece. I knew another friend who gagged mid-way, another who got lockjaw, another who turned to lesbianism almost immediately afterwards. My nerves were getting the better of me as I waited for him to begin. And waited.

He kissed me on the cheek – ‘’Night
bela,’
he said, and then left. I nearly died.

‘Right,’ said Fliss, ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, he’s just a wank. He likes things a certain way. You need to keep perspective. Don’t let them hurt you.’

‘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.’

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 the house. After we shut the door behind us, we screeched and hugged. We had a huge, wonderful house. And it was absolutely free.