The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read online

  ‘These two should be in bed,’ grumbled the woman, baring a roll of abdominal flesh and sticking the needle in.

  Jason and Gemma, righteously offended by the allegation that they were sleepy rather than maltreated, looked poised for a fresh set of tantrums. Beatrice got on her hands and knees again. ‘I think I’ve lost my feet,’ she said, peering nearsightedly around the floor. ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘They’re here!’ cried little Jason, as she turned away from him. ‘Where?’ she said, spinning back.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Joanne. ‘Here comes Freddie with the food.’

  A hassled-looking fellow with no chin and a porridge-coloured windcheater lumbered into view, several paper bags clutched in each hand.

  ‘World’s biggest rip-off,’ he announced. ‘They keep you standing there with your little voucher for two quid or whatever. It’s like the dole office. I tell you, in another half an hour, if this lot don’t bloody well – ’

  ‘Freddie,’ said Beatrice brightly, ‘this is my husband, Peter.’

  The man put down his packages and shook Peter’s hand.

  ‘Your wife’s a bit of an angel, Pete. Is she always taking pity on waifs and strays?’

  ‘We . . . we both believe in being friendly,’ said Peter. ‘It costs nothing and it makes life more interesting.’

  ‘When are we gonna see the sea?’ said Gemma, and yawned.

  ‘Tomorrow, when you wake up,’ said the mother.

  ‘Will the nice lady be there?’

  ‘No, she’s going to America.’

  Beatrice motioned the little girl to come and sit against her hip. The toddler had already dropped off to sleep, sprawled against a canvas backpack filled to bursting point. ‘Wires slightly crossed,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s my husband who’s going, not me.’

  ‘You stay home with the kids, huh?’

  ‘We don’t have any,’ said Beatrice. ‘Yet.’

  ‘Do yourselves a favour,’ sighed the man. ‘Don’t. Just skip it.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t mean that,’ said Beatrice. And Peter, seeing that the man was about to make an off-hand retort, added: ‘Not really.’

  And so the conversation went on. Beatrice and Peter got into rhythm, perfectly united in purpose. They’d done this hundreds of times before. Conversation, genuine unforced conversation, but with the potential to become something much more significant if the moment arose when it was right to mention Jesus. Maybe that moment would come; maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they would just say ‘God bless you’ in parting and that would be it. Not every encounter could be transformative. Some conversations were just amiable exchanges of breath.

  Coaxed into this exchange, the two strangers relaxed despite themselves. Within minutes they were even laughing. They were from Merton, they had diabetes and depression respectively, they both worked in a hardware superstore, they’d saved up for this holiday for a year. They were none too bright and not very fascinating. The woman had an unattractive snort and the man stank terribly of musk aftershave. They were human beings, and precious in the eyes of God.

  ‘My plane is about to board,’ said Peter at last.

  Beatrice was still on the floor, the head of a stranger’s child lolling on her thigh. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

  ‘If I come with you to Security,’ she said, ‘and hold you when you’re about to go through, I won’t be able to cope, I swear. I’ll lose it, I’ll cause a scene. So kiss me goodbye here.’

  Peter felt as if his heart was being cleaved in half. What had seemed like a grand adventure in the prayer room now bereaved him like a sacrifice. He clung to the words of the Apostle: Do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.

  He bent down and Beatrice gave him a quick, rough kiss on the lips, clasping the back of his head with one hand as she did so. He straightened up, dazed. This whole scenario with the strangers – she’d engineered it to happen, he could see that now.

  ‘I’ll write,’ he promised.

  She nodded, and the motion shook the tears out onto her cheeks.

  He walked briskly to Departures. Forty minutes later he was up in the sky.

  2

  He would never see other humans the same way again

  The USIC chauffeur emerged from the gas station with a bottle of Tang and a spotless, supernaturally yellow banana. Dazzled by the sun, he scanned the forecourt for his tanked-up limousine and its precious foreign cargo. That cargo was Peter, who was using this fuel stop to stretch his legs and attempt one last call.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Peter. ‘Can you help me with this phone?’

  The man seemed flummoxed by this request, jerking his hands around to indicate that they were both full. In his dark blue suit, complete with tie, he was overdressed for the Florida heat, and was still suffering some residual stress from the plane’s delayed arrival. It was almost as if he held Peter personally responsible for the turbulent atmospheric conditions over the North Atlantic ocean.

  ‘What’s the problem with it?’ he said, as he balanced the drink and the banana on the sun-blazed surface of the limousine’s roof.

  ‘Probably nothing,’ said Peter, squinting down at the gadget in his palm. ‘I probably don’t know how to use it properly.’

  That was true. He wasn’t good with gadgets, and used a phone only when circumstances forced him to; the rest of the time it would hibernate in his clothing, eventually becoming obsolete. Every year or so, Beatrice would tell him what his new number was, or what her new number was, because yet another service provider had become too frustrating to deal with or had gone bust. Businesses were going bust with alarming frequency these days; Bea kept up with stuff like that, Peter didn’t. All he knew was that memorising two new telephone numbers every year was not easy for him, despite his ability to memorise long passages of Scripture. And his unease with technology was such that if he pressed the gadget’s call symbol and nothing happened – as he’d just done, here in the blinding limbo of Florida – he couldn’t imagine what to do next.

  The chauffeur was keen to resume the drive: there was still a long way to go. Biting off a mouthful of banana, he took hold of Peter’s phone and examined it mistrustfully.

  ‘Has this got the right kinda card in it?’ he mumbled as he chewed. ‘For calling . . . ah . . . England?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Peter. ‘I believe so.’

  The chauffeur handed it back, non-committal. ‘Looks like a healthy cellphone to me.’

  Peter stepped under the shade of a metal canopy that overhung the fuel pumps. He tried once more to tap the correct sequence of symbols. This time, he was rewarded with a staccato melody: the international code followed by Bea’s number. He held the metal lozenge to his ear and stared out at the unfamiliarly blue sky and the sculpted trees surrounding the truckstop.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me,’ he said.

  ‘ . . . ello?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he said.

  ‘ . . . hear you . . . ’ said Bea. Her voice was enveloped in a blizzard of static. Random words jumped out of the phone’s tiny amplifier like stray sparks.

  ‘I’m in Florida,’ he said.

  ‘ . . . middle . . . night,’ she answered.

  ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’

  ‘ . . . love you . . . how are . . . know what . . . ?’

  ‘I’m safe and sound,’ he said. Sweat was making the phone slippery in his fingers. ‘Sorry to be calling you now but I may not get another chance later. The plane was delayed and we’re in a big hurry.’

  ‘ . . . e . . . o . . . in the . . . me . . . guy know anything about . . . ?’

  He walked further away from the vehicle, leaving the shade of the metal canopy. ‘This guy knows nothing about anything,’ he murmured, trusting that his words were being transmitted more clearly to her than hers were to him. ‘I’m not even sure if he works for USIC.’

&n
bsp; ‘ . . . haven’t ask . . . ?’

  ‘No, I haven’t asked yet. I will.’ He felt a bit sheepish. He’d spent twenty, thirty minutes in the car with this chauffeur already and hadn’t even established if he was an actual USIC employee or just a driver for hire. All he’d learned so far was that the photo of the little girl on the dashboard was the driver’s daughter, that the driver was newly divorced from the little girl’s mother, and that the mother’s mom was an attorney who was working hard to make the driver regret the day he was born. ‘It’s all very . . . hectic at the moment. And I didn’t sleep on the flight. I’ll write to you when I’m . . . you know, when I get to the other end. Then I’ll have plenty of time and I’ll put you in the picture. It’ll be just like we’re travelling together.’

  There was a rush of static and he wasn’t sure if she had fallen silent or if her words were being swallowed up. He raised his voice: ‘How’s Joshua?’

  ‘ . . . first few . . . he just . . . o . . . ink . . . side . . . ’

  ‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. And this guy wants me to stop talking. I have to go. I love you. I wish . . . I love you.’

  ‘ . . . you too . . . ’

  And she was gone.

  ‘That your wife?’ said the driver when Peter had settled back into the vehicle and they were pulling out of the truckstop.

  Actually, no, Peter felt like saying, that was not my wife, that was a bunch of disassembled electronic noises coming out of a small metal device. ‘Yes,’ he said. His almost obsessional preference for face-to-face communication was too difficult to explain to a stranger. Even Beatrice had trouble understanding it sometimes.

  ‘And your kid’s called Joshua?’ The driver seemed unconcerned by any social taboo against eavesdropping.

  ‘Joshua’s our cat,’ said Peter. ‘We don’t have children.’

  ‘Saves a lot of drama,’ said the driver.

  ‘You’re the second person in two days who’s told me that. But I’m sure you love your daughter.’

  ‘No choice!’ The driver waved one hand towards the windscreen, to indicate the whole world of experience, destiny, whatever. ‘What does your wife do?’

  ‘She’s a nurse.’

  ‘That’s a good job. Better than an attorney anyways. Making people’s lives better instead of making them worse.’

  ‘Well, I hope being a minister achieves the same thing.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the driver breezily. He didn’t sound sure at all.

  ‘And what about you?’ said Peter. ‘Are you a USIC . . . uh . . . staff member, or do they just hire you for taxi jobs?’

  ‘Been a driver for USIC for nine, ten years,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Goods, mainly. Academics sometimes. USIC holds a lot of conferences. And then every now and then, there’s an astronaut.’

  Peter nodded. For a second he imagined the driver picking up an astronaut from Orlando Airport, pictured a square-jawed hulk in a bulbous space suit lumbering through the arrivals hall towards the placard-wielding chauffeur. Then he twigged.

  ‘I’ve never thought of myself as an astronaut,’ he said.

  ‘It’s an old-fashioned word,’ conceded the chauffeur. ‘I use it out of respect for tradition, I guess. The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that’s always been there, and the next minute it’s just a memory.’

  Peter looked out the window. The motorway looked much the same as a motorway in the UK, but there were giant metal signs informing him that splendid attractions like the Econlockhatchee River and the Hal Scott Regional Nature Preserve were somewhere nearby, hidden beyond the windbreaks. Stylised illustrations on billboards evoked the joys of camping and horseback riding.

  ‘One of the good things about USIC,’ said the driver, ‘is that they have some respect for tradition. Or maybe they just recognise the value of a brand. They bought Cape Canaveral, you know that? They own the whole place. Must have cost them a fortune, and they could’ve built their launch site somewhere else, there’s so much real estate up for grabs these days. But they wanted Cape Canaveral. I call that class.’

  Peter made a vague noise of agreement. The classiness – or otherwise – of multinational corporations was not a subject on which he had strong opinions. One of the few things he knew about USIC was that it owned lots of formerly defunct factories in formerly destitute towns in sloughed-off parts of the former Soviet Union. He somehow doubted that ‘classy’ was the right word for what went on there. As for Cape Canaveral, the history of space travel had never been of the slightest interest to him, even as a kid. He’d not even noticed that NASA had ceased to exist. It was the sort of nugget of useless information that Beatrice was liable to unearth while reading the newspapers that would later be put underneath Joshua’s food bowls.

  He missed Joshua already. Beatrice often left for work at dawn, when Joshua was still fast asleep on the bed. Even if he stirred and miaowed, she would hurry off and say, ‘Daddy will feed you.’ And sure enough, an hour or two later, Peter would be sitting in the kitchen, munching sweet cereal, while Joshua munched savoury cereal on the floor nearby. Then Joshua would jump on the kitchen table and lick the milk dregs from Peter’s bowl. Not something he was allowed to do when Mummy was around.

  ‘The training is tough, am I right?’ said the chauffeur.

  Peter sensed he was expected to tell stories of military-style exercise regimens, Olympic tests of endurance. He had no such tales to tell. ‘There’s a physical,’ he conceded. ‘But most of the screening is . . . questions.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said the driver. A few moments later, he switched on the car radio. ‘ . . . continues in Pakistan,’ an earnest voice began, ‘as anti-government forces . . . ’ The chauffeur switched to a music station, and the vintage sounds of A Flock of Seagulls warbled out.

  Peter leaned back and recalled some of the questions in his screening interviews. These sessions, held in a boardroom on the tenth floor of a swanky London hotel, had gone on for hours at a time. One American woman was a constant presence: an elegant, tiny anorexic, who carried herself like a famous choreographer or retired ballet dancer. Bright-eyed and nasal-voiced, she nursed glass mugs of decaffeinated coffee as she worked, aided by a changeable team of other interrogators. Interrogators was the wrong word, perhaps, since everyone was friendly and there was an odd sense that they were rooting for him to succeed.

  ‘How long can you go without your favourite ice-cream?’

  ‘I don’t have a favourite ice-cream.’

  ‘What smell reminds you most of your childhood?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe custard.’

  ‘Do you like custard?’

  ‘It’s OK. These days I mainly have it on Christmas pudding.’

  ‘What do you think of when you think of Christmas?’

  ‘Christ’s Mass, a celebration of Jesus’s birth, held at the time of the Roman winter solstice. John Chrysostom. Syncretism. Santa Claus. Snow.’

  ‘Do you celebrate it yourself?’

  ‘We make a big deal of it in our church. We organise presents for disadvantaged children, put on Christmas dinner at our drop-in centre . . . A lot of people feel horribly lost and depressed at that time of year. You have to try to get them though it.’

  ‘How well do you sleep in beds that aren’t your own?’

  He’d had to think about that one. Cast his mind back to the cheap hotels he and Bea had stayed in when they’d participated in evangelist rallies in other cities. The friends’ sofas that converted into mattresses of a kind. Or, further back still in his life, the tough choice between keeping your coat on so you’d shiver less, or using it as a pillow to soften the concrete against your skull. ‘I’m probably . . . average,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s a bed and I’m horizontal, I think I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you irritable before your first coffee of the day?’

  ‘I don’t drink coffee.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes you’re
irritable?’

  ‘I don’t get annoyed easily.’ This was true, and these interrogations provided additional proof. He enjoyed the sparring, felt he was being tested rather than judged. The rapid-fire questions were an invigorating change from church services where he was expected to orate for an hour while others sat silent. He wanted the job, wanted it badly, but the outcome was in God’s hands, and there was nothing to be gained by getting anxious, giving dishonest answers or straining to please. He would be himself, and hope that that was enough.

  ‘How would you feel about wearing sandals?’

  ‘Why, will I have to?’

  ‘You might.’ This from a man whose feet were sheathed in expensive black leather shoes so shiny that Peter’s face was reflected in them.

  ‘How do you feel if you haven’t accessed social media for a day?’

  ‘I don’t access social media. At least I don’t think so. What do you mean exactly by “social media”?’

  ‘It’s OK.’ Whenever a question got tangled, they tended to change tack. ‘Which politician do you hate most?’

  ‘I don’t hate anyone. And I don’t really follow politics.’

  ‘It’s nine o’clock at night and the power fails. What do you do?’

  ‘Fix it, if I can.’

  ‘But how would you spend the time if you couldn’t?’

  ‘Talk to my wife, if she was at home at the time.’

  ‘How do you think she’ll cope if you’re away from home for a while?’

  ‘She’s a very independent and capable woman.’

  ‘Would you say you’re an independent and capable man?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘When did you last get drunk?’

  ‘About seven, eight years ago.’

  ‘Do you feel like a drink now?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some more of this peach juice.’

  ‘With ice?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Imagine this,’ the woman said. ‘You visit a foreign city and your hosts invite you out for dinner. The restaurant they take you to is pleasant and lively. There’s a large transparent enclosure of cute white ducklings running around behind their mother. Every few minutes, a chef grabs one of the ducklings and tosses it into a vat of boiling oil. When it’s fried, it gets served up to the diners and everyone is happy and relaxed. Your hosts order duckling and say you should try it, it’s fantastic. What do you do?’