Four

Changed into his uniform, with a cup of tea in his hand, when Seth came up from the staffroom he was hoping Piotr had already made his way down to the basement garage where his rusted shitbox car was parked. Instead, Piotr had merely pulled his red anorak over his sweat-clouded polyester shirt and was waiting for him. Grinning, he held up the duty log. ‘Ah, Seth being seeing the ghosts again! We all laugh so much when we read the log. Maybe he drink the whisky in the night and he see things, eh?’ He rolled his eyes and raised a hand as if to simulate drinking from a glass.

‘I didn’t say I saw anything. I reported a disturbance. A noise. Someone’s been in sixteen. I heard them.’

But Piotr wasn’t listening. ‘You should polish the brass at night. I tell Stephen but he no listen. Then you being doing work and not have the time to see the ghosts.’ The door closed on the swishing anorak and beaming face.

He wouldn’t make another report, no matter what he heard. Fuck it. He’d done his job; if something was stolen, he’d warned them.

He collapsed into the chair and thought again about the dream he’d had that afternoon. It left him nostalgic but uneasy. As a kid, he used to visit that chamber in nightmares. Trying to scream, while strangely mute, as he was pushed inside the chamber against his will. It started around the time his dad left. Over and over again, he used to find that weird stone chamber in his dreams. It was an actual mausoleum he’d once seen with his nan, as they walked through an unkempt corner of the cemetery where his grandfather was buried. All the flowers were dead and the names of people were worn off the stone tablets and markers. It terrified him. He could not accept that his mum and dad would die and leave him one day, and then end up inside one of those stone enclosures or the mausoleum. And that he would die too. His nan said, with a smile, ‘Not for a long time, Seth.’ But the cold marble mausoleum with the little light inside, and the locked gate and barred windows, haunted him. He imagined being put in there. Being dead in there. Where he would stand on the wrong side of the little gate crying for his mum and dad who couldn’t see him. Would watch them walk away through the headstones. He used to see them clearly, starting the white Allegro before driving off and leaving him behind the gate, sobbing, hysterical.

He shook himself. Even now he didn’t like remembering it. As a kid, the fear of the chamber used to tighten his chest so much he couldn’t breathe.

He should call his mum. His dad. His sister. The dream made him want to. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to any of them. He’d let everything go.

Seth sighed and glanced over the duty clipboard to force himself to think of something else. Only twenty of the forty apartments were in use. Same situation as during his four shifts the previous week.

Most of the penthouse suites were either holiday homes for the absurdly rich or corporate flats for employees working in the city. Although some of the flats were occupied by troublesome permanent tenants, he was rarely bothered during the night. Though he noted one addition in flat thirty-nine in the east wing. Someone had moved in. The old girl, Lillian, had died. In a taxi or something a couple of months back. Stephen had told him the day after, but he’d never seen the woman during his shifts. She never came out at night. The new tenant was listed as Apryl Beckford. He wondered what she looked like.

When he finished the last dregs of his tea, he walked into the ornamental garden built at the intersection of the two wings. He rolled and then smoked a thin cigarette while listening to the fountain. The memory of the dream dimmed and he began to feel something like relief to be back at work. There were few chores, only the occasional patrol to make and guest to sign in. It was less demoralizing than life at the Green Man, and more comfortable too. Once, before he started work at Barrington House, the building had even been featured in Hello! magazine, on account of some footballer who used to live there. An ideal old-school job for an artist, he’d once hoped, but he’d stopped sketching as soon as he took his place in the leather chair in reception. Now he suspected he had put himself there to forget and be forgotten; to ease himself out of mainstream life in the most comfortable way possible. And that notion no longer troubled him.

After his spent cigarette landed in the fountain he returned to the chair and began to yawn. Another restless night. Arab teenagers in performance cars circled Lowndes Square. He checked his watch. Still another ten hours before he could leave in the morning and fall into a deep sleep. Preferably a dreamless coma.

Leafing through the television listings in the Evening Standard, he was suddenly startled by the buzzing of the house phone. On the brass panel he could see a red light next to the label for apartment forty.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ he whispered to himself. It was Mr Glock, the middle-aged Swiss playboy, and the rudest man Seth had ever met. He picked up the handset to stop the deafening trill from the panel’s speaker. ‘Seth speaking.’

‘I need a taxi for Heathrow. Do it now.’ Mr Glock hung up.

No other tenant so reinforced his long-held suspicion that the rich were an unpleasant crowd. When he first began working in the building, the tenants and their absurd wealth intimidated him, as if their very presence shone lights about his stained tie, the scuffs on his shoes and the gaping holes in his curriculum vitae. It had made him ridiculously diffident in their presence. But after half a year of taking their stinking rubbish out and witnessing countless demonstrations of self-importance before his desk, compounded with their affected accents and vulgar furnishings, his awe had gradually reduced to a simmer of resentment. He’d little respect left for any of them. Especially Glock. Working here assured Seth that money favoured the worst kind of people.

He took the lift up to the fourth floor, where Glock’s bags would be waiting. On the way up he mopped his face with a paper towel. The texture of the paper hurt the hot, delicate skin of his forehead and cheeks. Remembering an Asian man who sneezed on him in the cinema, he wondered if he’d picked up a tropical illness from a foreigner. He rubbed at his neck, feeling the beginning of a tickle in his throat. Then recalled that nasty cold air he had sucked in while looking through the letter box of apartment sixteen, and winced. He thought he could still taste the dust.

Once Glock and his bags were taken care of, Seth rolled a cigarette and watched the cab pull away from the kerb and drive out of the square. He told himself it was absolutely the last time he was getting out of the chair for the duration of the shift. He felt like shit. The tickle at the back of his throat had turned into something raw. Under his blazer, his shirt clung to his back.

But his respite slumped behind the desk was short-lived. The next person to demand his attention was Mrs Shafer, the elderly wife of an invalided American stockbroker. They lived in apartment twelve.

Standing outside the building’s front doors, she began ringing the bell. The incessant buzzing tone that sounded behind his desk carried the full force of her annoyance. She appeared even more grotesque than usual, with her hair piled into a messy arrangement of scarves from which strands drooped around her doughy face. Fucking Halloween in a bandanna. He shivered with disgust. How could a woman let herself go like that? Especially one with so much money?

Seth buzzed her inside via the switch behind his desk. As she trundled into reception on her thick legs, a severe frown eroded her forehead. ‘What is the point. ’ There was a long pause. ‘We have trouble with it!’ She pointed at the door. Seth winced. Although accustomed to her hysteria and unpredictable temper, she never failed to frighten him. She was mad. Only the head porter, with his graceful manner and soft voice, seemed able to manage her moods.

She began to take short, shuddering steps towards his desk. ‘Don’t bother yourself!’ she shrieked at him. One of her arms flapped in the air until she resembled a dinosaur, the bulky body set forward at an angle, with short, fetal arms clawing out front. Mrs Shafer expected the porters to rush to the doors and manually hold them open as if she were royalty. Then it was customary to escort her from the lift to the front door of her apartment. This was a precedent set by Piotr and his relentless hustle for tips, but Seth refused to take part in the charade. It made him think bitterly of his wasted education – four years at art school, a master’s degree to follow – only to be reduced to placating a demented, rich bully who terrorized her tiny, disabled husband before the eyes of the door staff.

Mr Shafer rarely left the apartment. On the rare occasions he was seen, he was always accompanied by his shrill wife. He looked like a puppet with dried-out wooden limbs barely suspended above the ground, as if most of the strings had been severed. His wife would tug the old man about her massive skirts and constantly berate him, while he used all of his concentration and energy to balance as he took one slow step after another. Both the Shafers stank of stale sweat.

Seth stood up in front of his chair and said, ‘Good evening,’ so quietly he barely heard himself.

She flapped her arms again in exasperation and her face turned bright red. ‘Get Stephen! Phone Stephen now!’

She only stopped shouting when the lift doors opened behind her. For a moment the sound flustered her, then she shambled inside. A final mumble from her became a shrill cry that Seth could make no sense of. He had no intention of bothering Stephen; by the time she reached her apartment, she would have forgotten the altercation.

But he was to get no peace that night. Every arsehole in the building seemed involved in a conspiracy to make him work. By nine o’clock, Mrs Pzalis had phoned down three times from flat twenty-two to complain about the television reception. As did Mrs Benedetti from flat five. He wrote it in the log, but could see that the satellite company had been up on the roof twice since his last shift. At ten thirty, Mrs Singh in nineteen complained about a smell of smoke in the west wing, and before he could go and investigate, Mrs Roth in eighteen called down to tell him the same thing. There wasn’t a peep out of the fire and smoke alarms, but he had to check it out.

If Singh and Roth could smell it inside their apartments, then the smell was up by sixteen. A part of the building he’d planned to avoid on each of the three patrols he was obliged to undertake during the shift.

‘Cunt.’ He took the lift to the ninth floor.

The moment he left the lift and stood on the landing, he could smell it too: burned meat, singed clothing and something like sulphur. But there was no smoke, the doors were cold, and the rubbish stores were empty. It was a dead scent, but a deeply unpleasant miasma like the residue that lingered in a place where there had been an accident with fire. It was strongest near the door of number nineteen. Old Mrs Roth’s place.

He looked about him and was reminded why he’d never liked the building upstairs. Any of it, if he were honest. Even during the lighter evenings of the summer, when the fading sun reinforced the electric light in the communal areas, he found it gloomy. The old brown wood, the dull brasses and the thick green carpet seemed to absorb any illumination, particularly on the stairwells. They reminded him of those parts of old houses that remained forever in shadow. But despite the absence of human traffic in the stairwells and corridors, the place had an active energy. A kind of swarming, bustling sensation in the air, as if the presence of former activity was locked in place and unable to escape.

He descended to the eighth floor in a feverish, breathless daze. He decided to proceed swiftly across the landing and not stop, regardless of what he smelled or heard bumping and scraping about inside apartment sixteen. But it was not to be.

As he took the stairs two at a time and swung onto the landing he almost collided with a figure. A figure dressed in white and hunched over. It was standing a few feet before the door of apartment sixteen.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whimpered in a breathless voice and felt every hair stand up on his scalp.

The figure turned to stare at him. For a second he failed to identify the crumpled face and the curved bonnet of thin silvery hair. But then recognition struck. His shock passed and an immediate sense of relief washed through him. It was Mrs Roth. But in her nightgown, alone, and clearly distressed.

‘He’s come back,’ she said, on the verge of tears. Her needle-thin arms and arthritic hands trembled. Through the thin, silky material of her gown he could see the sharp bones of her shoulders and pelvis sticking out. Absurdly scrawny legs, knotted with veins, jutted from beneath the hem. Her clawed feet were bare.

‘He’s come back for me.’

She was ninety-two. He could do nothing but wonder how she had managed to walk down a flight of stairs on those legs. Mrs Roth was largely confined to her bed, being taken out for lunch just twice a week, with the help of two walking sticks and her Filipino maid, Imee.

Seth stood still and stared at her. He tried to swallow but it was too painful.

She pointed a disfigured hand at the door of flat sixteen. ‘Open the door. I want to see for myself.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Mrs Roth. Let’s get you back into bed.’

Angrily, she swatted the contortion of bone and thin skin that serviced as a hand. ‘I don’t want to be in bed!’

She wasn’t sleepwalking. And, despite her age, Mrs Roth had never seemed prone to even the vaguest confusion. In fact, she remained unfailingly rude and unpleasant at all times. Though she rarely bothered Seth at night, her maltreatment of the day staff was legendary. Even the head porter was terrified of her.

‘Please, ma’am. You shouldn’t be down here.’

He realized his mistake as he was speaking. Her face purpled with rage. She turned on him; pointed a finger, bent like a hook, at his face, so only the knuckle of the second joint was directed at his eyes. ‘How dare you!’ The normally perfect halo of transparent wisps on her head, fashioned into a bouffant, became disturbed. A few strands hung about her ears. Through what remained in place, he could see her pale scalp and the liver spots discolouring it. Her neck was thin and the flesh hung from her collarbones like loose leather. She reminded him of a bird. A beaky, fierce-eyed bird with a few feathers remaining on its plucked skin.

‘He’s back, I tell you! I heard him. I heard him laughing.’

Ordinarily, a man in his position would be prone to an embarrassed laugh or a nervous smile when confronted by a raving ninety-two-year-old woman in her nightgown, but there was something about her determined face and wild rheumy eyes that made Seth uneasy. Particularly considering what he too had heard on the other side of that door.

Seth made a bold move. He stood close to Mrs Roth, nodding in sympathy. ‘I know. I’ve heard noises in there for a while now. But what is it?’

‘What? Speak up. Don’t be ridiculous. What are you saying?’

He nodded his head towards the door. ‘In there. At night. I made reports. About the noises. The bumping. In the hallway. Furniture being knocked over. Things. Like that.’

Mrs Roth’s pointed face blanched a sickly shade of pale. The tremble in her frail, monkey limbs became a shake. He thought she might fall over, and moved forward to take her elbow. She clutched at him for support and dropped her head.

‘No,’ she whispered. And then, ‘No,’ again, but to herself. She looked up at him like a child after a fright. ‘Take me home. I want Imee. Get Imee. Where’s Imee? I want Imee.’

Tense and uncomfortable in the face of her indignity, he walked her slowly towards the lift door and then summoned it from the ground floor by punching the button in the polished brass plate. As he waited he realized his shirt was drenched with sweat again.

The groaning cables seemed to take an age to haul the heavy but elegant carriage up from the ground. And all the while, in his discomfort, Seth tried to reassure Mrs Roth with comments about Imee and bed, until she told him to, ‘Shut up, just shut up,’ and waved a hand at his face.

When he opened the outer doors and guided her inside the lift carriage, she screwed her eyes closed and seemed more decrepit and bent-over than ever, as if being forced to remember something especially painful. Something that broke her. Broke what little spirit remained in that old frail body.

Up on the ninth floor, the door to her apartment was still open, and Seth rang the bell to raise Imee, who came swiftly from her little room at the end of the long hall. Clutching her blue dressing gown across her front, as if to protect her modesty from the eyes of the porter, she snatched Mrs Roth off him, and cast him a sullen, angry look, before closing the front door on his whispered explanations. Mrs Roth had begun sniffing and crying the moment she saw Imee.

‘Bitch,’ Seth muttered at the closed door, and took the lift down to the staffroom in the basement. Where he pondered, with some discomfort, who Mrs Roth had been referring to outside the front door of apartment sixteen.