Falling down the stairs

“That’s all there is to the story.” A pause. A prick of the ears from me. All that there was to the story. And yet not. “I’ll tell you this for nothing, though. Nobody else has a key to that room. Those cat rugs are heavy, and they were FLUNG across the room. Plus, the dustpan and brush that hangs on the wall? They – were – in – the – cat – basket…”

His listener was silent, struck dumb by this revelation. With my back to them, I couldn’t see if this was because he’d been gripped by the story the same way I, as a disinterested listener, had been. A tale ideal for Hallowe’en. The mysterious movement of heavy rugs across a cellar room. The swapping of position with a dustpan and brush.

The speaker hadn’t finished, though.

“That was to draw my attention, when I went in. Nobody else could have gone in. Only I have a key. And even if a cat had got in there and I’d not noticed, it’s not the sort of thing a cat would do. A dog, maybe. But not a cat.”

Another pause. I found that I was waiting with bated breath. What would come next?

A reiteration. “That dustpan and brush was moved to draw my attention to it.”

That’s where his story ended. His companion went to the gents. He waited a couple of minutes, long enough to finish his coffee that must have cooled enough to drink down in one go. Then he made his own way to the gents, crossing paths with his friend.

I paid and left the café. Outside, it was drizzling and I regretted not having brought an umbrella. I hurried back to the car, abandoning my plan to wander around this small Yorkshire town made famous by a tv show. For a moment, I wondered if the two men talking in the ice cream parlour were from that show. They were the right age. But they were too real and besides, there hadn’t been any cameras in sight. Nobody was filming them.

I drove back over the moors, enjoying the autumn colours of the trees and the bracken, gold and orange against the green of the grass. Sheep were wandering freely across the trunk road that takes you across the back of Saddleworth, past the derelict Horse and Jockey pub and down a steep hill into Delph.

I am another year older now. I have carried my bones through twelve more months. And I am alone again.

No amount of trying can bridge the gap that has grown up between us. People do what they have to do. He does what he must and now so do I. It was never the same thing, and contortions of will could never make it so. It never even came close.

When I was younger, I would dream about falling down the stairs. When awake, I would fantasise about it, wondering how it would feel, wondering if I would die. I considered how each step would feel, banging into neck, into spine, into legs and skull as I fell. I would wake up from dreams where I was tangled in a heap, twisted and confused, looking up at the place where I had started.

When I was with him, the daydreams and the nightmares stopped.

Last night I dreamed of stairs again. I dreamed that we lived in a mansion and there were staircases everywhere, hidden ones and open ones, leading from one room to another in a labyrinth of ascension and descent. I was rushing from room to room so that he wouldn’t find me. And suddenly I broke free of the house and into a field that was full of rotting carcasses being pecked at by magpies. I was in a village populated by brothers married to sisters and where I knew that, if I stayed, I would be killed.

No falling down the stairs, but no comfort or cheer either.

Today, I drove and missed his voice. I didn’t miss anything else. I might have felt sorrow that we were so different in the end, too different, but it didn’t last long. When a decision is made, you must stick to it, no matter how sad, no matter how hollow it makes you feel.

From racing through midnight streets with only the moon as your witness, to driving across moors knowing there will be no more. It only takes a short time to move a million miles like that. Less time than it takes to fall down the stairs.

There’s a cure for everything.

This cure comes from within. It tells me that everything will be alright. I trust myself on this.

In silence, then, I listen to the words of others. I hear the echoes from their hidden cellars; the places where things move without assistance, to draw their attention to some mysterious fact. No mystery at all, if they just think about it. Nothing strange, just something to learn.

A jolt of recognition, maybe. A jolt that jars the spine and bangs the head, that feels like the edges of steps biting into your body as you fall, and at the bottom you look up and see the place you once were standing. The place you threw yourself off from, trusting yourself to the fall, trusting yourself to the landing, not caring if it snapped your neck, but knowing that it wouldn’t.

He’s a stranger to me. More than he ever was before. In suddenly recognising that all the things I’d told myself were true were lies, he became unknown. He turned into someone I don’t want to know. Face and hands and body all familiar to me. Everything I loved burnt into the core of me. And one sour conversation. One weary admission of defeat.

“Find someone else,” he said. “Find someone else to play this part. I’m tired of this shit.”

Freedom is found in the strangest of places. I was set free not, as I thought, from falling down the stairs, but from one man’s weariness of everything this had become. Not even that. Everything it had always been, by his destructive will.

Nobody else has a key to that room. Nobody else could get in to move things around, and yet suddenly the whole world was rearranged. Turned upside down; things on the inside now the outer layer.

I drove back to the place I used to call home. I collected belongings I’d forgotten were in my possession. I packed them into my car and drove to the place I now call home, with its warm painted walls lined with books that stand upright and lie across the tops of each other. Six rooms, all mine. Doors front and rear with locks to which only I have the keys. Nobody else. Just me.

Twelve more months added to my bones. Twelve more months of filth and dreams, everything I feel locked inside where nobody can touch it.

He smiled so sweetly. I don’t need to remember or forget.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006