The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read online

  ‘We have tools to slice the bottle open without smashing it,’ she said. ‘We could open the bottle, extract the papers, gently separate them, read them …’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ he challenged her gently. ‘You and me?’

  Siân smiled, keen to stay on the right side of him. The thought of him closing the lid on his treasure box and carrying that scroll out of her life was hard to bear. Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, she was thinking.

  ‘There’s a man I know at the University of Northumbria who could do the bottle for me,’ she said. ‘The papers I could do myself, right here.’

  ‘Mm.’ He sounded non-committal. Hadrian had wandered off, restless, miffed that the humans had allowed both the stroking and the running to lapse. He was in Saint Mary’s churchyard again, pondering the bas-relief horses stabled at the base of Caedmon’s Cross – horses that looked puzzlingly like toy dogs in a kennel.

  ‘So …’ said Siân. ‘What do you think? May I?’

  Mack reached into the box, and lifted the prize back into view.

  ‘Are you sure you can put it all back together? Just the way it is now?’ He handled the bottle firmly but with great tenderness. You’ll make a good doctor, Siân thought.

  ‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘A thin seam in the glass, that’s all you’ll see. And we’ll do it where hardly anyone would think of looking.’

  He raised one eyebrow dubiously. ‘We will, will we?’

  But, God bless him, he handed it over. One moment it was in his hands, the next she had received it into hers. Flesh brushed against flesh during the transfer.

  ‘Trust me,’ she said, as a thrill passed through her from wrist to toe, like a benign electric current looking for earth.

  It was very late that night before she could begin. Neville, her pal at the University of Northumbria who could cut the bottle open, was unavailable to see her until he’d finished giving his evening lectures, and then he had some story about his wife expecting him at home. Siân forced him to call his wife on his mobile and tell her he had a quick job to do. Then she flattered him about his way with a laser.

  ‘Honestly, Siân, can’t it wait till tomorrow?’ Neville had complained as he led her into his sanctum, switching on lights he’d only recently turned off.

  ‘This thing has been waiting for me since 1788,’ she replied.

  Hours later, in the privacy of the Mary Hepworth Room, Siân fondled the paper scroll with gloved fingers. It was light, as she’d expected from its loss of moisture, but also much more brittle than she’d hoped. Any fantasies she might have entertained of simply unrolling the sheets and smoothing them out flat were out of the question. Progress would be slow, methodical, painstaking – as always when rescuing anything from the ravages of time. Nothing ever came easy.

  This paper had clearly been sized with a lot of gelatine – and a rich gelatine at that, involving generous amounts of animal skin, hooves, bones. A nice smooth glossy paper it must have been, in its day – but water damage had turned the gelatine to glue. And whatever had dried the soggy paper out again had hardened it into something very like papier mâché. She prodded it gently with tweezers, and it responded with all the pliancy of driftwood.

  She should, she supposed, count her blessings: this treasure had survived, when it could easily have disintegrated altogether. But why did the process of retrieving anything from the distant past always have to be making the best of a bad job? Why couldn’t anything spring from antiquity fresh and intact? Why must all documents be blemished and brittle, all vases broken, all skeletons incomplete, all bracelets rusted, all statues vandalised? Why should only tiny scraps of Sappho’s poetry survive – why not all of it, or none?

  She chewed her fingernails, knowing her irritability was really just nervousness: excitement about what she might disclose, fear that she’d bungle the job. She threw on her jacket and went out to the garage near the railway station and bought four different chocolate bars. By the time she returned to her hotel room, she’d already eaten three of them and her pockets were crackling with the wrappers. She paused in the doorway of her bedroom to take a long swig of complimentary mineral water. Then, highly alert and faintly nauseous, she laid out the tools and equipment for her surgery.

  By 3 a.m., she was nudging the confession of Thomas Peirson into the light of the 21st century. For hours, she’d been humidifying the scroll, rolling it gently back and forth on a metal grid suspended over a photographic tray of warm water, then re-sealing it inside a garish placenta of blue plastic. The paper had finally absorbed enough vapour to relax a little, and the gelatine was loosening its grip. Now, with a palette knife, Siân began peeling the outermost sheet from its companions.

  Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788

  In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now closed the door on Doctor Cubitt & weeps in the room below, I write these words.

  The fibres of the paper were exceptionally frail; the rags from which the paper had been made must have been shabby stuff indeed, poorly pounded. The brown ink of Thomas Peirson’s handwriting stood out tolerably well against a background that hadn’t discoloured much, but then the paper’s whiteness had less to do with thorough washing of the rags than with an expedient douse in that brand-new invention (well, brand-new in 1788, anyway) chlorine bleach. Inevitably, the bleach had left its own acid legacy, and with every gentle nudge of Siân’s knife, the weakened grain of the humid surface threatened to disintegrate. The words themselves were fragile, the gallic acid and iron sulphate in the brown ink having corroded little holes in the ‘e’s and ‘o’s.

  below, I write these words. In my fifty years of life I have been

  Been what? A thread of the paper had come loose, damaging the crown of one of the words in the line below. Siân paused, dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. She ought to give the paper longer to relax, get some sleep while it did so.

  Outside in the street, a drunken male voice shouted an ancient word of contentious etymology, and a female voice responded with laughter. The act from which all humans originate, evoked in a word whose own origins were long lost.

  Siân laid her head against her pillow, one leg hanging off the bed, the other twitching wearily on the mattress. She closed her eyes for just a moment, to moisten them before getting back to the task.

  ‘I love you – you must believe that,’ the man with the big hands whispered into her ear. ‘I’ll risk my soul to save yours.’

  He sounded so sincere, so overwhelmed by his love for her, that she pressed her cheek against his shoulder and hugged him tight, determined never to be disjoined from him.

  Within minutes, of course (or was it hours?), her head was disjoined from her neck, and the seagulls were screaming.

  Later that same morning, when the sun was high over Church Street and the hundred and ninety-nine steps were glowing all the way up the East Cliff, Siân stood poised at the foot of them, breathing deeply, getting ready for the climb. The sharpness of the sea air was sort of restorative and yet it was making her dizzy too, and she was finding it hard to decide if she should keep breathing deeply or cut her losses and get moving. She still hadn’t begun the climb when, half a dozen breaths later, she was jolted from her under-slept stupor by the shout:

  ‘Kill, Hadrian, kill!’

  It was Magnus’s voice ringing out, mock-imperious, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. All she knew was that a large animal, barking raucously, fangs bared, had sprung into her path, ready to knock her sprawling.

  ‘Hey!’ she yelped, half in fear, half in recognition. Hadrian leapt back on to his haunches, panting with pleasure. His cream-coloured snout was still twitching, his teeth still bared, but in a whimpery, goofy grin.

  ‘Show ’er no mercy, boy,’ said Mack, jogging into view. He was taller and better-looking than she remembered, stripped down once again to athletic essentials, his bare legs glistening in the sun, his T-shirt sta
ined with a long spearhead of sweat pointing downwards.

  ‘You scared me,’ she chided him, as he drew abreast of her and continued to jog on the spot, his limbs in constant motion.

  ‘Sorry. Cruel sense of humour. Blame it on my father.’

  Though his face was flushed and she was regarding his pounding feet and pumping fists with disdainful bemusement, he seemed unable to stop running on the spot. It was an addiction, she’d read somewhere. Exercise junkies.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, stand still.’

  ‘It’s a glorious day!’ he retorted, throwing his arms wide to the sun as he continued to pound the stone under his feet. ‘Come on, let’s run up the steps!’

  ‘Be my guest,’ she said.

  ‘No, together!’ He leapt onto the first step, sending Hadrian bounding ahead in a fit of joy; then after scaling a few more, he ran back down to her.

  ‘Come on – show me how fit you are!’

  Siân was sick with embarrassment, dumbstruck by his rudeness. If he noticed her distress, it only spurred him on.

  ‘Come on – slim young woman like you,’ he panted, ‘should be able to run up a few stairs.’

  ‘Please, Mack …’ His flattery was crueller than insults. ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘It’s all about pacing yourself,’ he persisted, his face flame-red now, suggesting he was ashamed, but had gone too far to retreat now. ‘You take a breath … every three stairs … sixty-six breaths …’

  ‘Mack,’ she said. ‘I’m an amputee.’

  For a moment he paced on, then abruptly stopped.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, his fists dangling loose at his sides. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Hadrian had scampered down to join them again, bearing no grudge for the way they’d teased him. He looked up at Siân and his master’s faces, back and forth, as if to say, What next?

  Mack wiped his huge palm across his face, then did a more thorough job with the hem of his T-shirt. A little boy finding a pretext for hiding his face from an angry parent. A beautiful young man baring his abdomen, muscled like a Greek statue.

  You bastard, thought Siân. I want, I want, I want.

  ‘Which leg?’ asked Mack, when he’d recovered himself.

  She lifted her left leg, wiggled it in the air for as long as she could keep her balance.

  ‘It’s a good prosthesis,’ he said, adopting his best physicianly tone.

  ‘No it’s not,’ she retorted irritably. ‘It’s a Russian job, mostly wood. Weighs a ton.’

  ‘You haven’t considered upgrading to a plastic one? They’re really light, and nowadays—’

  ‘Magnus,’ she warned him, caught between bewildered laughter and bitter fury, ‘it’s none of your business.’

  To her relief, he dropped the subject, swallowing hard on his no doubt encyclopaedic knowledge of artificial limbs – if ‘encyclopaedic’ was the correct word for a professional acquaintance with the glossy promotional brochures that prosthetics companies sent to doctors.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding genuinely chastened. Hadrian, impatient for action, fidgeted between them, his downy black forehead wrinkled in supplication. Siân stroked him, and it felt good, so she knelt down and stroked him some more.

  Mack knelt too, and since her hand was busy with the head and mane, he stroked the flank, hoping she wouldn’t pull away.

  ‘How did you lose your leg?’ he said gently, not like a doctor quizzing a patient, but like an average person humbled by curiosity to know the gory details.

  Siân sighed, not angry with him anymore, but struck by how absurdly inappropriate the verb ‘lose’ was in this context, how coy and, at the same time, judgemental. As if she had absentmindedly left her leg on a bus, and it was still lying unclaimed in a lost property office somewhere. As if, when the pain inside her was ready for the kill, she would ‘lose’ her life like an umbrella.

  ‘I lost it in Bosnia,’ she said.

  He was instantly impressed. ‘In the war?’ he suggested. She knew he was picturing her doing something exotically heroic, like pulling wounded children out of burning wreckage, and being blown up by an enemy shell.

  ‘Yes, but it had nothing to do with the war, really,’ she said. ‘I was there because my boyfriend was a journalist. And we were stepping out of a bar in Gorazde when a car knocked me down, right there on the footpath. It was a drunk teenager behind the wheel.’ She frowned irritably at Mack’s look of disbelief. ‘They have drunk teenagers everywhere, you know, even in Bosnia, even during wars.’

  ‘And your boyfriend?’

  ‘What about my boyfriend?’

  ‘Was he … injured?’

  ‘He was killed—’

  ‘—I’m so sorry—’

  ‘—four weeks later, by sniper fire. He’d already dumped me by then. Said he just couldn’t see it working out, him and a disabled person. He’d have to devote his whole life to taking care of me, he thought.’

  Mack grimaced, tarred with the guilt of a fellow male he’d never even met.

  ‘You’ve done brilliantly, though,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No one would know.’

  ‘Not unless they tried to make me run up a hundred and ninety-nine steps, no.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Siân patted Hadrian’s head. It was as far as she was willing to go towards letting the dog’s master off the hook. Let him sweat, she thought. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Every muscle on his torso seemed already to be defined with the stuff.

  ‘Speaking of contrition …’ she said. ‘Your message in a bottle … your confession …’

  ‘Yes?’ He seized the change of subject gratefully, his head cocked in deference.

  ‘The job is trickier than I thought. You’re going to have to decide what’s more important to you, Mack: knowing what that document says, or keeping it the way you like it. The shape of it, I mean. If I succeed in peeling those pages apart, I’ll be doing well. I can’t give them back to you in the form of a nice tight scroll inside a bottle.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ she said, manoeuvring him gently towards where she wanted him. ‘It’s your heirloom, Mack. I can glue the bottle shut again, return it to you tomorrow.’

  She turned away to acknowledge Michael coming up the steps, greeting the poor little duffer with a cheery wave. Michael nodded back, squinting, almost tripping over his own feet in his attempt not to intrude. She could tell that in his myopic eyes, she and Mack were the enigma of romance, stumbled upon, unearthed, only to be handed over to experts for analysis. Sweet, shy little man – how she despised him …

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mack was saying. ‘There’s something magic about it, just the way it is …’

  ‘Well, there is one thing we could do,’ she said, figuring she’d softened him up enough. ‘I could make you a new scroll out of papier mâché, and stick a facsimile of the outermost page on the outside. I know how to make things like that look old and authentic. The original papers could be mounted on board, preserved properly, and you could have a replica that’d look pretty close to what your dad found.’

  He laughed.

  ‘More historical fakery, eh?’

  She looked him square in the eyes.

  ‘Do you want to know what the confession says or not?’

  He pondered for no longer than three seconds. ‘I do,’ he conceded.

  That afternoon, Siân and her colleagues at the dig said goodbye to Keira and Trevor, who were decamping to the Middle East. In their place, the ‘very nice people’ from north Wales had already settled in – another married couple who’d been together forever. They wore matching jumpers and identical shoes. They whispered to each other as they worked, and kissed each other on the shoulder or on the side of the head. Siân knew very well they were adorable, but disliked them with an irrational passion. They smelled so strongly of happiness that even on the exposed headland of Whitb
y’s East Cliff, the odour was overpowering.

  I want, I want, I want.

  At three-thirty, the heavens opened and the site supervisor declared the day’s digging at an end. Thirteen of the fourteen archaeologists hurriedly dispersed into the downpour, hunched under nylon hoods and plastic habits, like a herd of monks fleeing a new Dissolution of the Monasteries. The younger ones sprinted down towards the town, free to embrace the unimaginable luxuries of the modern world.

  Siân, without a raincoat or umbrella, walked gingerly on the slick and treacherous terrain, watching where she put her feet as the rain penetrated her scalp and trickled down the back of her neck.

  Every few seconds, she cast a glance towards the hundred and ninety-nine steps, hoping against hope that Mack and Hadrian would be coming up to meet her. They weren’t, of course. Still she cherished a forlorn fantasy of Mack surfacing from the horizon, running up the steps, one arm holding aloft an umbrella. Pathetic. Saint Hilda would be shaking her head despairingly, if she knew.

  The car-park between the abbey ruins and Saint Mary’s Church, which ordinarily failed to register on Siân’s consciousness at all, annoyed her intensely today as she crossed it. What was it doing here, littering a sacred space with automotive junk? Buried somewhere underneath this dismal moat of concrete, this petrol-stained eyesore, lay oratories and other buildings erected by simple Christians more than a thousand years ago. What would it take to clear away this garbage, short of a bomb?

  Siân winced at a flash of recollection – the sound of the shelling she’d experienced in Bosnia, the blasts and rumbles that drove her deeper into the crook of Patrick’s arm as they lay in bed, a few miles from the action.

  ‘Pretend it’s a thunderstorm,’ he’d advised her. ‘It can’t hurt you.’

  ‘Unless it hits you,’ she’d said.

  ‘Then you won’t feel anything,’ he’d said, almost asleep.

  A lie, of course. Nothing dies painlessly. Even a limb that’s long gone keeps hurting.

  For more than an hour, Siân traipsed around the streets of Whitby, searching for something to eat. She was in one of those perverse moods where nothing seemed appealing except what was patently not on offer. A lively Greek or Turkish restaurant, with lots of different dips and delicacies and peasant waiters hollering at each other across the room – that would do. Or a Chinese buffet, with spiced noodles and tiny spring rolls and hot soup. She was most definitely not in the mood for fish and chips, which, in Whitby, was an unfortunate way to be.