The Devil's Staircase (24 page)

He let go of her throat, screamed, immobilised: a possum electrocuted on a power-line.

‘Hang on,’ Bronny rasped, ‘I’m nearly there. Nearly there.’ As she pressed harder, his penis fused with his testicles, the smell of burning flesh rising with his screams.

His dick flattened to overdone.

‘NOOOO!’ he screamed.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes.’

Prising her melted skin from his, Bronny flicked the coal away and put her hand in the bucket of water.

Hamish fell and rolled around on the floor, yelling. After a moment, he began edging his way towards the glass again, screaming, smashing at it with his hands and legs. Bronwyn no longer had the strength to stop him.

The glass cracked.

Bronny realised she could not overwhelm him. She noticed the tin Hamish had hit her with next to her right foot. She looked at it properly for the first time – it was rat poison.

Another fracture appeared in the glass wall. One more thump and he would be able to kill Celia and her.

Taking off the lid, Bronny tilted the open tin of liquid poison over the coals and roared: ‘Move and I’ll let it go!’

Hamish turned and looked. It took him a moment, and then his eyes registered.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.

She could see Celia on the floor outside, lying down, eyes barely open. She could see Hamish daring her, not believing her.

‘You’re too afraid.’

Bronny tilted the poison. A drip landed beside the coals.

She smiled, because an hour ago, Hamish would have been right. She would have been scared – of test results, of ordering drinks on planes, of roller-coasters and heights and . . .

She smiled, because that was an hour ago.

Hamish smashed the glass, harder this time, and the fractures expanded.

Bronny tilted the tin. The liquid oozed onto the coals, spitting and spluttering a dirty yellow steam which rose up to enter their throats like cut glass.

Hamish and Bronny fell to the floor.

She’d thought a lot about the actual moment.

She’d imagined yelling in anger to stop the pain, screaming ‘No!’ or ‘More morphine!’ or ‘Help me, help me! Please, please, for God’s sake, help me!’

She’d imagined seeing a light and reaching out her hand with a weirdly contented expression on her face.

She’d imagined embarrassing herself with a grey unflattering bra and shitty underpants that did not match.

She’d imagined embracing Catholicism at the last moment, just in case.

She’d imagined flashes of her life zooming past like trucks overtaking her car window on the freeway.

She’d imagined floating above herself and looking down to a bed surrounded by doctors and nurses and crying people.

She’d imagined calling the last of a long line of people into the room and telling them it’s okay and that she’d always be with them, in a way.

She’d imagined calling the first of only a short line of people into the room but being told by a scary nurse that the person had nipped out to the milk bar to get eggs.

She’d imagined being overcome with tremors of terror that this was it, this was death, it was coming, and nothing she could do would stop it.

The moment had come and she didn’t want to grab or yell or scream or hold her hand to the light and she didn’t feel terrified or think about final speeches. She was too busy coughing, and if she hadn’t been too busy coughing, the only thing she’d have wanted to do was cry.

Gathering her upper half into a foetal position and drawing her wide-open knees as close to her chest as possible, Bronny saw a tiny scar on her left knee. She’d never noticed it before – must’ve been from that trike accident when she was three.

Vera Oh dropped Pete at the front entrance to the Porchester. It looked like the bastard was heading for France.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him,’ she said, feeling confident that they had their man, that they would find him, save Celia, and that no one else would get hurt.

Pete leapt out of the police car and ran towards the door to the Porchester. The doctor hadn’t told him, but he could tell from his voice that it was yes. The poor girl, she had it. Pete was glad, at least, that she had found somewhere safe to hide, and prayed as he ran that she would still be there so he could hold her, hug her, tell her it would be okay. Not only would they find a way to deal with it together, but they would have at least twenty years of love and happiness, more than most people get in a lifetime.

Pete picked the lock and went inside. It was dark, and he couldn’t hear anything.

‘Bronny?’ he yelled.

Pete felt the soil of the bamboo palm. It was wet. She was here.

‘Bron, I know you’ve spoken to the doctor. Where are you?’

He looked in the kitchen – no one was there. He walked through the double doors, down past the plunge pool, down the stairs. The place was filled with steam.

‘Bronny! Where are you?’

He walked towards the steam rooms and tripped over. When he stood up, he realised he’d fallen over a woman.

He knelt down and rolled her onto her back, recognising immediately that it was Celia. He gasped, knowing this meant Hamish was here, that Bronny was in danger. Checking her pulse, Pete carried Celia upstairs as quietly as possible. He put her in the reception booth in the recovery position, satisfied that she was breathing, and rang the police.

Pete ran into the relaxation area, then downstairs through the mist and looked into steam room 1, steam room 2, sauna 1 . . . then sauna 2. The door was closed, and Bronwyn and Hamish were in spasms on the floor.

The Sick Man felt very sick. He thought back to when he’d been ill as a boy, and his mother had trickled water from a flannel onto his forehead. It had felt good. The sound was soothing. She might have smiled at him. He couldn’t remember, but he liked to think she had.

A trickle of water was what he needed, just as he had after days of crippling agony, of listening to every noise at the door, of watching outside to see if she was coming home. Was that her? Coming home? No, it wasn’t. It was a postman, a girl jogging – an okay feeling for a moment – another postman, and another, social services, not a trickle.

He’d felt sick ever since, except for the occasional moment, but never as sick as he’d felt in his twelve-year-old self’s bedroom, not even now. Not even now, lying on the floor of a sauna that had steam made of razor blades slashing your bleeding innards.

Could he please hear it now? Not the coughing and the banging and the yelling. Not the shattering of glass and the scream, but the trickling of water from a flannel to a forehead?

Could he?

Please?

Pete had lost everything. At birth, his mother, to drink. At five, his father, to England. At twenty-four his country, to cars. And now . . .

Like all those other times, he knew he was powerless to stop it. Like when the yelling got so bad his Dad called a taxi, hugged him at the door, cried, and said: ‘There’s nothing else I can do, son. I’ll visit.’

Like when his Mum had peed herself while he microwaved two packets of real beef lasagne.

Like when the need to say
fuck you
had gotten so desperate that he’d smashed a window with his bare fist and punched an officer with the same hand.

So he was used to losing things. But as he washed water over Bronwyn, hoping the toxins would leave her body, he prayed for the ambulance to be fast, please God, because he didn’t want to have to
lose
again, didn’t want to have to recover, get tougher, again.

Vera Oh had been heading south at high speed when the call came in. She said fuck, then shit, then swerved full pelt across the motorway.

‘Fuck, shit and fuck,’ she said, taking out an emergency cigarette from her glove compartment, lighting it, and sucking the guilt into her lungs. It was her fault, wasn’t it? She’d had him in the cell, the weed. Had questioned him at length, and ignored a gut feeling that it might be him – something about the way he had all the right answers ready.

‘It’s just a feeling,’ she’d admitted to her fellow interrogator. ‘Nothing concrete.’ And with continuing suspicions about the husband, and with Peter McGuire and his leather gimp mask
in situ,
she’d let him go.

‘Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit,’ she continued, lighting the second emergency cigarette.

‘You’re only supposed to have one,’ her police passenger remarked, returning the Silk Cuts to the glove compartment. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ was her answer.

When Vera finally arrived at the entrance to the baths, five other police vehicles were already there, along with two ambulances.

‘Inside,’ someone yelled.

Vera ran towards the corner door.

The last few weeks don’t flash before me, they amble. I’m touching the rough face of a beautiful man. I’m losing my shoe on a London roof. I’m being carried on a Singapore conveyor belt. I’m sitting on top of the world watching Australia go on and on beneath me. I’m running away from the hospital.

And now I’m running towards my home. Mr Todd, caked in cracked dirt, is riding one of his horses out of the old railway, smiling. The pigs are scampering onto the street from the bacon factory, wriggling their ears. Ursula and Dad are on the veranda, waving at me as I run towards them. My steps are getting bigger. They’re huge and fast and high, so high that, just when I think I’m going to land on the veranda, I fly right past and land several feet on the other side. I turn and jump back towards Dad and Ursula again, but it’s like I’m slowly crawling up the hill of the Scenic Railway and when I hurtle back down, I land even further on the other side. They’re looking up at me now. I must be thirty feet up in the air, yelling at them as I come down to land at least sixty feet away from them this time.

I breathe. I’ve been dunked in the freezing plunge pool and Pete’s embracing me, crying, and saying, look at me, hold on, hold on. I can see Vera Oh. I can see Greg smiling down at me: ‘Thank you, Celia’s alive, she’s okay, thank you, thank you,’ he says.

‘I love you,’ Pete whispers.

I know exactly how to respond . . .

‘I want you to come home with me. Do you understand?’ He nods, and locks his fingers with mine. A man who loves me is holding my hand as I die.

Greg disappears to go to Celia.

I close my eyes. Pete has joined Ursula and Dad on the veranda. They’re getting smaller and smaller, so teensy as I leap back and forth.

I can’t see them at all now.

Is that a trike?

The bounding is starting to feel exhilarating.

I find myself yelling: ‘
Wheeeee!’

Thanks to my editor, Alison Rae at Polygon, and to my early twenties, which I somehow survived.