The Devil's Staircase (2 page)

I was scared of heights, so I closed my eyes and remembered what my Dad had told me after forcing me to climb to the top of the old jail’s watchtower. I’d emerged from the stone spiral staircase to find sweeping views and a flimsy wooden barrier that I thought would break at any moment.

‘Breathe deeply,’ Dad said. ‘Don’t think so much. Imagine you’re on terra cotta.’

It had made me giggle, but it hadn’t worked then, and it wasn’t working now.

I decided alcohol might.

Two hours later, I was sitting on top of the world, sipping its Bacardi and Coke. I had a whole row of seats to myself and had gathered enough courage to peek out the window. Australia was going on and on beneath me. I’d lived in an Australia with boundaries – the Great Dividing Range, Melbourne, the old railway, the O’Hair farm – and had never fully understood the extent of my country. It never ended. From seat 23b, where I was sipping my seventh Bacardi and Coke, Australia was an infinite dried-out pancake.

It had taken a while to order the first drink because I had no idea if I had to pay for it or not. This was my first flight anywhere and I knew nothing about passenger etiquette. ‘Would you like something?’ the airhostess had asked, and I was too nervous to say yes, so I watched several rows order drinks first before being absolutely sure that the booze was free, and then ordered seven in quick succession.

‘I’m Bronny!’ I said to the man in 24c. ‘I’ve had too much to drink.’

‘You should never tell a man you’ve had too much to drink,’ he said without smiling.

‘Okey-dokey,’ I said, returning to my seat, my face reddening. What did he mean?

‘What does it mean if a guy says, “Don’t tell a man you’ve had too much to drink”?’ I whispered drunkenly to the woman in 23a.

‘It means he’s a prick,’ she said, and I smiled, but I didn’t know why, because I had no idea what she was on about either.

I went to the toilet and threw up into the metal bowl that told of each and every bottom that had sat upon it, leaving splotches of blood, wet poo still clinging to the sides, a dangling seat cover, a rubber glove. I added my story to the bowl in the form of Bacardi and Coke and reconfigured Cheesles, popped two tic tacs in my mouth, and returned to my seat. Then I fell asleep for a very long time.

A very long time on a long haul flight, I discovered, was two-and-a-half hours. That meant there were two hours to go till the transit experience in Singapore. I was hungover, my legs were fidgeting furiously, the flat dried-out pancake below had turned to ominous black water, and then the pilot announced that we were cruising at 30,000 feet. 30,000 feet! That’s a lot of feet. I closed my eyes and prayed that if there was a God could I please die floating slowly enough – without engines one, two, three and four – to write goodbye letters to dear ones before plummeting into the concrete ocean?

I was panicking. What was I doing? I had no money, no contacts, no clothes and no job prospects. I asked for paper and a pen, no longer worried about what I could or could not do as a Qantas passenger. (Judging from the group of graduates in 11 and 12 who were throwing cashews into each other’s mouths from great distances I figured I could pretty much do anything I liked.) The writing material came and I began a second letter to Dad and Ursula.

Dear Dad and Ursula,

I’ve made a mistake. I have no money, no contacts, no clothes and no job prospects. I’ll save till I can come home . . .

I tore it up. What good would it do to worry them? Anyway, it was ten minutes to landing.

I got off the plane and shuffled into the massive terminal building. People moved purposely on or beside huge moving walkways. Everyone seemed to know exactly where they were heading. I followed them, jumping on the walkway and holding the band at the side carefully.

That’s when I met the man in 24c again. Hamish was his name. He was teeny, with John Lennon glasses and bright lips. I smiled at him.

‘Still drunk?’

I shrugged.

‘First time, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

I’m not sure if he followed me, or if I followed him. All I know is that I spent my time in Transit-ville with Hamish from Toronto; who was heading back to London after going to a friend’s memorial service in Ballarat. Poor girl, one minute she’d been sailing off Devon, the next she was dead somewhere at the bottom of the sea. I sat with Hamish for the next two legs of the journey and he talked me through several full-blown panics variously prompted by turbulence, an unidentified flying thing not far from the wing under my window, a passenger who held his bag (bomb) a little too tightly, a full-blown fist fight between one of the graduate cashew-throwers and a parent whose toddler got hit in the crossfire. We watched the disconnected pieces of three movies. We stood together in the passport queue at Heathrow, where to my horror Hamish informed me that I was not an EU member and would therefore have to stand in the
other
passport queue with the Chinese and Africans. Then we got the tube together to the Royal, where Hamish ran an Internet café. He’d told me the hostel was cheap, clean and good fun. Even better, he’d said, a cleaning company came round each morning to gather casual workers for the day.

‘We’re full,’ the hostel manager said, eyeing me up and down and then handing Hamish his key. ‘You should’ve booked online.’ I could have cried. I had arrived in London with 400 Australian dollars, which I’d expected would do me till I found a job, but by the time I’d arrived in Bayswater, I’d spent 150 of them. I had enough money left for three nights in a dump like the Royal, which didn’t have any room anyway.

I took off my windcheater and sat on the bench, dizzy and faint. I was wearing jeans, runners and a flimsy singlet and had forgotten to put a bra on the morning before, what with the stress of finding out for certain if I was going to die.

‘Oh, will you look at that,’ the manager said, glancing down at me and then turning to his computer screen. ‘We’ve got one after all.’

The hostel manager, an Aussie-Italian called Francesco, had thought Bronny was a boy till she took her windcheater off. She wasn’t a boy. She had large unclad eighteen-year-old breasts and so a room had appeared. Room 13, with the chick from New Zealand. Yes, yes.

He offered to carry her bags, but she had none, so he showed her to the room, a two-berther on the second floor. Hers would be the bed by the door.

‘I don’t suppose you have a spare towel?’ she asked.

‘On the strict condition that you come to the party tonight,’ he said, captivated by several things other than the aforementioned breasts – her honest face, her natural, under-groomed hair; and her smile, which seemed entrancingly shadowed by melancholy.

It was a deal.

After Bronny had showered and dried her hand-washed pants under the hand drier, she had a nap. Her room-mate, Fliss, was still at work apparently, so she slept soundly, then went into the Internet café on the ground floor. The café was at the front of the hostel, overlooking the street. Hamish was sitting at one of the six terminals. The coffee machine in the corner seemed to be the only ‘café’ part of the room.

‘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.’

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.