Phyllis Painter, though, was gone.
Even before he’d lifted up his eyes to find the alley empty save for him he’d known she wouldn’t be there with the certain fatalism that he’d felt before in nightmares, in those dreams where the one thing you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you know is guaranteed to happen.
All around him was the sooty, weathered brickwork of the jitty, with on Michael’s right what seemed to be the rear wall of a factory or warehouse interrupting the long run of washing-line-festooned back yards. Was this “the Works” the girl had mentioned as their destination? A black wire mesh could just about be seen through the thick dust of this establishment’s high, isolated windows, and a rusting pulley-wheel stuck out beside the gated wooden platform of what Michael thought must be a loading-bay. The empty alley stretched
before him, a much greater distance than he could recall its mortal counterpart extending, and he didn’t think that Phyllis Painter would have reached the far end of it before he’d looked up, even allowing for his clumsy tumble. It seemed much more likely to him that she’d turned off from the dismal passageway into a door or gate that opened in the factory’s rear on his right side.
Keeping this hopeful notion in his mind he stole a little further down the alley’s pathway, like a cobbled streambed in the overcast grey light, until he was around the point he thought the girl had been when he’d last sighted her. Between the blunt stones of the alley floor sage-coloured grass poked up and there were the same minute scraps of refuse that he would have ordinarily expected to be there: an untipped cigarette end, a beer-bottle cap that had been dented in its middle by a bottle-opener, some chips of broken glass. The bottle-top had “Mask-Mask” printed on it where there should have been the brewery’s name, and the glass fragments seemed on close inspection to be shards from broken soap-bubbles, but Michael doggedly refused to pay these things attention. He trod slowly onward, looking for an opening in the wall, a door or gap that Phyllis might have vanished into, and at last he found one.
Set into the rear face of the factory or warehouse was a covered stairway, made of old and foot-worn stone that ran up from behind a barred iron gate that stood ajar, half open on the otherwise deserted alleyway. The odd arrangement seemed familiar, and reminded Michael of a gated flight of steps that he’d once seen in Marefair, opposite St. Peter’s Church. He’d asked his mum about it and she’d recollected with a shudder how, during her girlhood, Doreen and her best friend Kelly May had climbed the old stone staircase for a dare, only to find a tower-room that was empty save for dead leaves and “a gret big nest of earwigs”. Michael wasn’t fond of earwigs, since his sister had once told him how they got in people’s ears and ate straight through their brains until they reached the warm pink daylight filtering through the other eardrum. Alma had provided helpful sound effects to illustrate what he would hear during the week or so it took for the determined bug to tunnel through his tousled infant head: “Munch, munch … creep, creep, creep … munch, munch, munch … creep, creep, creep.”
On the other hand this daunting stairway seemed like his best chance of catching Phyllis Painter, who, although he didn’t really like her much, was the one person in this run-down paradise that Michael knew the name of. If he couldn’t find her, he’d be lost and dead. With this in mind he summoned all his pluck and pulled the iron gate a little further open so that he could slip inside. The bar he wrapped his fingers round was gritty and abrasive to the touch and had a kind of mild sting to its texture. Opening his hand he found that it had left a toilet-smear of rust across his palm. It smelled of stewed tea.
Sucking in his tummy so as not to get the rust and muck on his pyjamas he slid through the gap that he had made between the gate and its brick frame. Once Michael was inside he pulled the railed gate shut behind him without really knowing why. Perhaps it was to cover up the fact he’d broken in and he was trespassing, or possibly it just made him feel safer knowing nothing could creep up the stairs behind him without Michael hearing the gate grating open down below. He turned and peered uncertainly into the darkness that began just six steps up. In normal circumstances he supposed his breathing would be tremulous and shallow, his heart hammering, but Michael realised belatedly that his heart wasn’t doing anything at all and he was only drawing breath when he remembered to, more out of habit than necessity. At least he didn’t have a sore throat anymore, he told himself consolingly as he began to mount the stairs. That had been really getting on his nerves.
He had been climbing in the dark for a few minutes when it struck him that this foray up the staircase had been a disastrously bad idea. His slipper-shod feet crunched, with every rising step, through a detritus that felt like dead, brittle leaves but could as well have been black drifts of earwig-husks. To make things worse, the stairs that he’d expected to be straight turned out to be a winding spiral, forcing Michael to proceed more slowly in the blackness, with his left hand resting on the turret wall and following its contour as he stumbled upwards, resting lightly, in case there were slugs or other crawling things he didn’t want to accidentally stick his fingers in.
Hoping he’d soon get to the top, Michael continued his ascent beyond the point where the idea of turning round and going back became unbearable. Five minutes more of crunching upwards through the darkness, though, convinced him that there wasn’t any top, that he had seen the last of Phyllis Painter and that this was how he was condemned to spend Eternity, alone and climbing through an endless blackout with the possibility of earwigs. Munch, munch. Creep, creep, creep. What had he done, in his three years, to merit punishment like this? Was it when him and Alma killed those ants? Did an ant-murder count against you when it came to the hereafter? Worried now, he carried on his halting progress upward, having no idea what else to do. His only other plan was to start crying, but he thought he’d save that until later on, when things got desperate.
As it turned out, this was roughly nine steps later. Michael missed his mum, his gran, his dad. He even missed his sister. He missed 17, St. Andrew’s Road. He missed his life. He was just trying to decide which step he should sit weeping on until the end of time when Michael noticed that the pitch black up ahead of him appeared to have a greyish quality about it. This might be, he thought, because his eyes were gradually adjusting to the dark, or it might mean that there was light a little further on. Encouraged, he renewed his clamber up through pearly gloom where there had previously been only opaque black. To his delight he could soon even see the spiral stairway he was climbing, and was much relieved to find that the crisp forms he had been crunching through were neither leaves nor earwigs. They were the wax paper wrappers that you got on individual cough-sweets, hundreds of them, littering the steps. Each one had the word ‘Tunes’ in tiny, cherry-coloured writing, this repeated several times on every crumpled scrap.
Turning a final bend he saw a door-shaped opening through which weak morning light was falling, only a few steps above. With the medicinal pink blossoms of the cough-sweet wrappers fluttering up around his heels he broke into a run up these last stairs, eager to be on level flooring and able once more to see where he was going.
It was a long interior corridor, painted pale green to halfway up its high walls and with stained and varnished boards forming its floor. It was the sort of passageway that Michael thought belonged inside a school or hospital, only much loftier, so that even an adult would feel child-sized by comparison. Along each of its sides the hall had windows which were letting in the washed-out daylight, though these were positioned too far up for Michael to see out through. Those upon his right, if he looked up through them, revealed only the same drab, leaden sky that he had seen outside over the alleyway. The row of windows on his left, alternatively, seemed to look in on some sort of ward or classroom. Somewhere indoors, anyway, of which Michael could only glimpse the beams and boards that formed its pointed ceiling. The hallway was empty save for two or three big metal radiators, painted in the same dark green you saw upon electric junction boxes, spaced out down the length of the hushed corridor. There was the smoky, biting scent of rubber and the smell of powder paint, like toxic flour. Whatever this place was, it didn’t seem to be the factory or warehouse he’d presumed it to be when he was outside, although after the twists and turns of the unlighted stairway Michael wasn’t even certain that he was in the same building anymore. The only thing he knew for sure was that there wasn’t any sign of Phyllis Painter.
Probably the best thing that he could have done would have been to descend the lampless steps back to the alleyway, to see if he could find her there, but Michael found he couldn’t face the prospect of another hoodwinked fumble through the darkness, and especially not one that entailed going downstairs this time, with a greater risk of tripping up and falling. There was nothing for it except to continue onwa
rds, down the silent and puncture-repair-kit-perfumed corridor to its far end.
Along the way he thought of whistling to keep his spirits up, but realised that he hadn’t yet learned any tunes. Besides, he couldn’t whistle. As another way of interrupting the oppressive quiet he trailed his fingernails across the chunky upright bars of the huge radiators when he passed them. Icy to the touch, they indicated that the heating system they were part of had been turned off for the summer. Furthermore, to his surprise, Michael discovered that each hollow shaft of metal had been tuned by some means to produce an individual note. Each radiator was equipped with seven bars, and when he let his fingers wipe across the first such row of pipes it played the opening part of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, one of the only melodies familiar in his thus-far limited experience of music. Both intrigued and charmed by this he hurried on to the next radiator, further down the hall, which turned out to be tuned so that it played the “How I wonder what you are” part when he brushed it.
By the time he’d got to “Up above the world so high” Michael was at the passageway’s far end where, having reached a corner, it turned sharply to the left. As cautious and as stealthy as an Indian scout he peered around this bend and saw only another stretch of empty landing without anything to differentiate it from the first. It had the same wood floorboards and the same walls, pale green at the bottom, chalky white above. The row of high-set windows on his right looked up onto a dreary fleece of sky while those upon his left looked up into the rafters of the ward or schoolroom that he wasn’t tall enough to see into. On the plus side, however, there were three more radiators, and this length of corridor appeared to end not with another corner but with a white wooden door, closed shut but hopefully not locked.
The first of the three radiators that he came upon played “Like a diamond in the sky” when Michael drew his taut and stiffened fingertips across it, as if he were strumming an industrial harp. The next two, as he had by then anticipated, clanged out the last couplet that completed the refrain by echoing its opening lines, with the concluding “How I wonder what you are” only a dozen paces from the closed door in which the long passage terminated. Nervously, he tiptoed over to it then reached up his hand to turn the plain brass knob and find out what existed on the far side. How he wondered what it was.
It wasn’t locked. That much at least was in his favour, but he still reeled back from all the unexpected brightness and fresh air that rushed in through the open door to overwhelm him. Blinking, he stepped out into a faint refreshing breeze and found that he was on a balcony, its black wood railing running left to right in front of him, coloured as if with a protective coat of pitch. Walking across to this and gazing out between its rails, Michael was looking down on a vast hall, its many-levelled far wall a full mile away. The hall’s floor was divided up into a sprawling grid of sunken apertures that looked like windows that had been erroneously installed in the wrong surface. Up above this plain of holes, out through the glass tiled roof of a Victorian arcade, faceted clouds unfolded languidly into impossibility against the background of an unsurpassable azure. He was back in the Attics of the Breath, or at least on the balustrade-edged walkways overlooking them. Could that be right? He didn’t think he’d made enough turns to have come almost full circle, but then that long spiral staircase had confused him so he didn’t know in which direction he was heading.
Looking to his left along the elevated walkway he could see a distant figure who was striding resolutely off across the boards away from him. He hoped for a brief instant it was Phyllis Painter, but no more than that. For one thing, the retreating person was much taller than the little girl had been. Also, despite the longish hair and long white frock that they were wearing, they were clearly male. The man stalking away along the balcony was powerfully-built and barefoot, and held one hand to his face as though he nursed some injury. In his other hand he held a slender rod or staff that thudded on the planks at every step. With a slight start, Michael recalled the angry-looking man with the split lip and the black eye who he’d glimpsed from the floor below when he was crossing it with Phyllis. This was the same person, surely? Him, or someone very like him.
Michael then remembered that there had been someone else standing in conversation with the white-robed brawler, someone who had whiskers and a coat of green rags with a bright red lining. From the prickling of his neck he knew that this was who would be behind him when he turned around, even before the cracked brown leather voice spoke from just over Michael’s tartan shoulder.
“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”
Michael shuffled round reluctantly, with his plaid slippers moving like the hands of a disoriented clock.
The ruddy and bewhiskered giant, who clearly had a good foot-and-a-half on even Michael’s strapping dad, was leaning with one elbow on the pitch-stained railing, smoking a clay pipe. His broad-brimmed priest’s hat threw a band of blackness over deep-set crinkly eyes that Michael noticed with a growing feeling of uneasiness were two entirely different colours, one like inlaid ruby and the other a reptilian green. They glinted like impossibly old Christmas baubles from the shadows of a heavy, straggling brow, above a hooked nose with a bend that turned almost straight downwards, like an eagle’s beak. The man’s skin, on his lower face and his bare arms where they protruded from his coat of rags, was sunburned and smeared here and there with blotches of what looked like tar or motor oil. He smelled of coal and steam and boiler-rooms, and underneath his flapping rags were dark green britches and stitched boots of well-tanned leather. Though his mouth could not be seen amongst the brassy tangles of his beard and his moustache, you could tell he was grinning from the way his cheeks bunched into shiny balls of sun-scorched flesh and broken veins. He puffed on his clay pipe, which Michael saw now had the features of a screaming man carved on its bowl, and let a wisp of violet smoke twist upward from the balcony before he spoke again.
“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
The man’s voice was worryingly deep and creaked like some great prehistoric monster opening its wings. Michael decided that he’d better act as if this were a normal conversation with somebody who was offering directions. Noticing that on his right were more of the high windows that he’d seen when in the corridor, he feigned an interest in them with a voice that was embarrassingly high and piping after the man’s grown-up growl.
“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in those windows for me so that I’ll know where I am?”
The bearded fellow frowned in puzzlement, then did as he’d been asked and glanced in through the windows that looked out onto the balcony. Having thus satisfied himself, he once more turned to study Michael.
“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialities. I’m also rather good at sums.”
He cocked his curly, bushy head upon one side so that his hat-brim tipped down at a slant and sucked once more upon his pipe, a grey fog brimming from his fleshy lips as he opened his mouth to speak.