The Devil's Staircase Read online

  ‘G’day,’ Hamish said, putting on a bad Aussie accent, before setting Bronny up on one of the terminals to write an email to her family.

  ‘Ursula and Dad, I’m fine,’ Bronny typed. ‘I’m at a hostel in London and it’s really friendly. I’ve already got a job. I love you!’

  After finishing her email, Bronny offered Hamish the pound she owed him.

  ‘Buy me a drink instead,’ Hamish said.

  He looked cute without his glasses on, Bronny thought to herself, and they headed to the basement together, both feeling as though they had been best friends forever.

  The party was in full swing. About twenty twenty-somethings were standing in the dining room area with MTV on full blast. Bronny did a quick scout of the room and noticed that everyone was relaxed, drunk and happy. She hadn’t been to a party since Rachel Thompson’s fourteenth in Seymour, which had ended at 9 p.m. with cake and lemonade. Bronny downed several beers, the first beers she had ever downed, and then introduced herself wildly to her new world:

  Fliss, her New Zealand roommate, who’d just finished her shift at the pub. She was a wannabe model: dark shiny hair, deep brown eyes, ten feet tall and so thin she was see-through.

  Ray the ginger Jo’burg locksmith.

  Zach from Torquay in Oz, long-haired, guitar-toting, and a lover of Lenny Kravitz.

  Pete from Adelaide, with huge muscles and a stern grimace to match.

  Cheryl-Anne from Wagga Wagga, whose brown hair was straighter and thinner than paper and who had a three-year-old daughter: in Wagga Wagga.

  And Francesco . . . Mmm . . . Francesco, with his unusual accent.

  ‘Just suck it in!’ he’d said, as Bronny sat over the bong later that night. ‘Hold it in for a few seconds and then let it out slowly.’

  Her cough lasted longer than is socially acceptable, and ended with arms in the air, a Heimlich manoeuvre, two glasses of water and a ‘whitey’.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Francesco said, as he watched her sitting fully clothed under the running shower.

  ‘Hold my hand, I’m slipping away. I can see a light.’

  ‘I’ll hold your hand, but you’re not going to die,’ Francesco said, as the water slipped down over her extended lower lip and onto her T-shirt. ‘You’re going to have waves, then throw up, then we’re going to dance. And in the morning we’re going to go to that place in Queensway and have smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels.’

  4

  After Francesco had seen me through the whitey, he escorted me back downstairs and we danced non-stop. We held hands, embraced for the slow ones, and sat close to each other on the sofa in the corner of the dining room. We were officially together, I assumed, a couple. We talked about all kinds of stuff – what he’d seen travelling, which was restaurants, what he did back home, which was eat out. I told him about work at the Mint: how some guy put his hand in the coin-blanking presser and lost his finger, and how a woman had been killed by a four-wheel-drive on the way to the MacDonald’s down the road. The vehicle had swerved to miss a stray sheep – it missed the sheep, but splattered her all over Ronald. Francesco asked me if anything other than death and destruction went on at the Mint, and I said I didn’t think so. My job was so boring – I was a filing clerk – that stories of injury and death were the only memorable aspects of it.

  I told him about Ursula, a go-getter who always, always, got what she wanted. When Mum bought a pink and a blue Humpty-Dumpty, she got the pink one. When she wanted to go to Luna Park and I didn’t, we went. When she decided to do medicine at Melbourne Uni, she did. I didn’t mention her lucky test results, not only because I didn’t want to talk about it, but because I realised he’d fallen asleep.

  I’d never been up close with a boy before. The closest I’d gotten was at the Easter tennis tournament when Paul Fletcher and I won the mixed doubles and we had to hold one handle of the trophy each for the Kilburn Free Press photograph. Paul Fletcher was just like all the other Kilburn boys – a bogan with red hair and a tendency to wear ball-crunching Aussie rules shorts.

  I looked at Francesco, with his groovy jeans and well-cut shirt that hadn’t crinkled despite the dancing and the sleeping. I moved towards him and then lay down beside him. But I couldn’t sleep. I felt overwhelmed, touching a man with the perfect amount of imperfections – a slight tummy, a large brown mole on his neck, soft hair on his arms. I looked him over, touched his shoulder, his hand. When he woke I was tingling all over. The dining room was empty except for bottles, fag butts and us. He woke and smiled at me: ‘You’d better get going if you want to catch James.’

  ‘What about the bagels?’

  ‘I’ll get one for you for later.’

  James was the New Zealander who ran the cleaning company. His white van arrived outside each morning at 8.30. He ate breakfast, for free, in the hostel basement, and then collected as many workers as he needed for the day. When I arrived back in the basement after a quick wash, looking very hung-over and grotty, he was just heading out the door.

  ‘Don’t suppose you need some extra hands?’ I said.

  He counted the hung-over crowd waiting by the van, then said no, actually, he had enough.

  I grabbed his arm before he could leave. ‘Oh, please. I’m completely broke.’

  Later, as I scrubbed the walls of a huge bakery, I thought about each and every moment from the night before, which had been the best night of my life. I recalled the first time Francesco and I danced together, when he’d put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me closer to him. I remembered lying with him on the sofa and watching as he slept. I smiled as I collected mouse droppings with my cloth, even though James was telling me to get a move on. I sighed as I collected filthy dishes from under the counter, and only half registered that I had dropped two of them en route to the kitchen. I closed my eyes and imagined his face as I stood in the bin area with an empty rubbish bag.

  ‘That’s it!’

  ‘What?’

  James was looking at me. I’d been standing with my eyes closed for some time, apparently. I’d ignored his orders to pick up the smashed plates – which he’d cut his hand on – and I was fired.

  From a cleaning job.

  I walked all the way to Bayswater, which took me three hours in the end. I suppose I’d formed an image of London in my eighteen years, mostly from An Ameri can Werewolf in London. I’d imagined scary underground tunnels, fog, grey skies, unhappy people, and werewolves. The only map I could get my hands on was a free tube map, so I walked from tube to tube, asking newspaper vendors at each one to point me in the direction of the next. Along the way, I was surprised at how exciting and clean London seemed. Orderly, beautiful, with interestingly dressed people who were, I had to admit, rather unhappy looking. I found myself entranced by the hugeness of it, by the neat perfect fruit on display in the small shops, the endless number of cafés and places selling individual slices of pizza and the gorgeous rows of Victorian and Georgian buildings.

  When I got back to the Royal, I was exhausted, covered in mouse droppings, had the same singlet and jeans on that I had worn for the last three days and stank pretty much of shit.

  ‘Francesco!’ I called out as I fell into reception. He was sitting at his desk beside the owner, an elderly Polish gentleman with glasses. ‘I was fired!’

  ‘Really?’ Francesco said. ‘Why don’t you go have a shower and we’ll chat when Mr Rutkowski’s finished?’

  ‘Okey-dokey.’ My lovely Francesco.

  I peeked into the Internet café. Cheryl-Anne was tapping away on a computer.

  ‘Check this,’ she said, showing me a photo she’d downloaded from the night before. I was dancing wildly next to Francesco, beaming. Around ten others were dancing too, but Pete, the muscular guy from Adelaide, wasn’t. He was sitting, watching me.

  I forwarded it to Dad and Ursula: SUBJECT – PROOF OF HAPPY STATE OF MIND.

  The door to Hamish’s room, a single directly off the café, was closed. I decided no
t to bug him – he was probably having a snooze – and headed straight up to my room.

  I knew something was up when I opened the door. My bed was unmade – and I remembered that I’d made it before heading to the party – and when I looked at the shelf beside it I noticed that my shoulder bag was gone. I searched frantically around the room but it wasn’t there. Bugger.

  No big deal, really, I thought to myself. I could apply for another passport, and there was no hurry, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. There was only £60 in the bag, as I’d pre-paid for two nights at the hostel, and I was sure Francesco or Hamish would help me out after that. I was thinking these positive thoughts when Fliss came into the room.

  ‘Did he make you do it in a shop window?’

  ‘Who?’

  Fliss went silent for a few seconds, bemused looking. ‘Do you want to borrow a top?’

  ‘Oh God, yes! I smell like dog shit. I was about to go to the charity shop but my bag’s gone missing.’

  The next hour was a lesson in hostel living. Fliss, the expert, laid down the economic law as follows:

  Cider (not lager), ‘e’ (not cocaine), rollies (not ready-mades), grass (not hash), Kwiksave (not Sainsbury’s), feet (not trains), texts (not calls), pockets (not bags), squats (not hostels).

  I’d not had a best friend since prep, when I’d accepted Jennifer Simmons’s kind invitation to come and play after school. It was my very first day, but I felt so grown up I said yes without even thinking about it, then ran out of the playground before Mum had a chance to find me, and skipped hand in hand with Jennifer to her house around the corner.

  ‘Jennifer, go to your room!’ her mother said when we giggled our way onto their porch.

  ‘Do you know how to get home?’ she asked me.

  I don’t remember her waiting for my answer before shutting the door in my face. Of course I had no idea how to get home. I was five and had only ever been as far as the bacon factory, so I wandered around Kilburn marvelling at how large everything was.

  Everything was very large indeed: large trees, large sky, large red house, large horse . . . It was Mandy, one of Mr Todd’s horses. Mr Todd was a leftover from the drovers’ days who slept rough in the old railway. He was part of the search party my nine-year-old sister had organised:

  ‘Mum, you stay by the phone. If the police don’t ring you in ten minutes, ring them,’ Ursula had ordered from her control centre at the kitchen bench. ‘Dad, take the streets to the right of the main road . . . Mr O’Hair, you take the ones to the left . . . Toddy, cover the school . . . I’ll keep ringing the mothers . . .’

  As usual, her plan worked. Within the hour, Toddy had lifted me up onto Mandy, and led me home like a fairy princess.

  I went off Jennifer Simmons after that, or she went off me, and since then I’d never had one particular friend who I enjoyed the way I was enjoying Fliss. She was absolutely gorgeous, with perfect fake tits that she offered to me like new puppies.

  ‘Have a feel!’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I can appreciate them from here.’

  She had a flippant way of doing everything, as if washing, dressing, sleeping, talking and eating got in the way of the things that really made up her life.

  And she was experienced. ‘Cut off your pee midway,’ she advised, ‘Prevents the bucket fanny.’

  ‘Don’t eat before speed,’ she advised, ‘or you’ll cancel it out.’

  ‘Never text back with yes,’ she said, ‘say . . . I’l think about it.’ ‘Always have a bottle of Evian at hand in case there’s no way out of swallowing.’

  Fliss was notching up, she said, after her engagement had ended.

  ‘Prior to last April, I’d slept with one guy,’ she told me, picking up a huge Coke bottle full of international coins and shaking it. ‘One for every time since.’

  I held the Coke bottle in my hand and did a quick estimate, using the skills I had honed after seven consecutive ‘Guess the number of Pollywaffles in the jar’ competitions at the annual Kilburn Show. There were two hundred and twenty five coins in there, I reckoned. (I won the competition twice in a row, and now hated Pollywaffles.)

  ‘Always use a condom,’ she said, taking the bottle from me and looking nostalgically at one particular coin inside.

  ‘Khagendra from Pokhara . . . He liked chocolate cake.’

  She replaced the bottle on her beside table.

  ‘I’ve never had sex,’ I told her.

  She stared, open-mouthed, before declaring that she would TOTALLY be my mentor. We would have actual sex classes and she would teach me everything because since April last year she had been declared by 98 per cent of the men in the Coke bottle to be the best fuck they had ever had.

  ‘What else would they say?’ I muttered, accidentally. ‘What?’ Fliss hadn’t expected her student to answer back. ‘“Actualy, sweetie, it was the third-best sex I’ve ever had.”’ Fliss pointed at herself and said: ‘Teacher’, then at me and said: ‘Pupil.’

  ‘I’ll shut up.’

  ‘You’ll shut up.’

  She willowed around the room checking for clothes that would fit and suit me while giving the first official lesson in sex by Felicity James, which dealt mostly with eye position during blow-job administration (open and looking up).

  Some time later I was lying in the bath, thinking about how Francesco had accidentally swept his hand across my thigh about an inch from you-know-where, when Fliss walked in. She was heading off to work. I took cover as best I could, but the bubbles from the borrowed soap-bits were few and far between and I had no face-washer.

  ‘The house next door’s been repossessed. We’re breaking in tomorrow.’

  I didn’t answer, as I feared she would turn around and look at my naked body. I was never one for changing openly at the Kilburn pool, for creaming my legs like Angela Ross with her huge fluffy fanny. I was the one with the towel hinged to my chin as I got undressed awkwardly, desperate to maintain my dignity. Actually, looking back, I think I was most worried about seeing myself.

  ‘Ray’s a locksmith.’

  I had climbed out of the tub as silently as I could and had almost managed to reach the towel with my desperate fingertips when she bounced around at me.

  ‘Do you want a space?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In the squat?’ She handed me the towel and turned to leave, looking back to add: ‘Oh, and precious . . . If you’re ever going to do it, you’ll have to get more comfortable with your body, which is fabulous by the way.’

  Hamish offered to lend me some money till pay-day, so I scampered off to the Slug and Lettuce. Fliss ‘worked’ there, but I soon realised that she really accumulated Coke-bottle coins, doing it in all sorts of grotty and impossible ways.

  The cricket was on the large screen in the corner. Around 80 Commonwealthers were crowded round it, drinking, watching, and chatting. I saw Fliss leave the bar to go somewhere, and found myself scouring the room for foreigners (i.e., Londoners). There were two thirty-something men with very posh English accents in the opposite corner. I introduced myself, they bought me three Bacardi and Cokes, then asked me how much.

  ‘We hear your friend charges fifty for full,’ one of the Englishmen said, pointing his head in the direction of Fliss, who had returned to pulling pints.

  ‘Liar,’ I said to the arsehole punters, leaving my latest drink on the table and heading back to my corner of the world to watch South Africa get their 213th run.

  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 thou
ght 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.’