The Stairs

Apples and Pears;
Horses for Courses ;
Ying and Yang.
Jules et Jim.


An urban tale about relationships in the twenty first century...




Music:

Lucky Number 8, Jennifer Castle













Content Warning:
Strong sex references, threat, disturbing scenes 

Transcript

The Stairs

It gratified Peter, that the tram delivered him directly from the railway station to the building where Kate and Eric lived. He squinted through the car windows at the city. He observed that the tram stop was located no more than five paces from the ground level entrance to the apartment block. At the time, Kate and Eric had been together five months; and they were entering their fourth month of tenancy at Potrose Properties. 

            They were at level 4, apartment B. 4B. Peter sought the angular, unfamiliar flat number on the dial-board outside the entrance. Through the door’s plate glass, he saw a security person lying languidly in a chair, his feet up on the front desk. Kate and Eric had laid a strip of white tape over the glass slat to the right of the button into which a printed name tag should have been slotted. In felt-tip, on the tape strip, someone had penned: Kate + Eric =   (the sum lay there, incomplete, not saying what it equalled. Perhaps the solution had faded, been bleached out of existence in the sun, or worn away by wind and rain. It all struck Peter as terribly, bleakly symbolic). Peter had no trouble reading the small handwriting, it was detail at a distance that he struggled to make out. The cursive handwriting was girly, the figures were girly. He took it be Kate’s hand rather than Eric’s. Right away, Peter sensed Kate’s new presidency, the new reign of priority she was able to exact over Eric. 

Peter and Eric had known one another, on and off, for twelve years. They had attended different secondary schools but had always lived close by. They had similar interests and this strengthened their bond. But in the time since they had both entered their twenties and Eric had moved away, Peter had been finding it harder and harder to preserve the friendship. It took more effort and more organising to do so; to, as it were, oxygenate their relationship, their bond, to keep it alive. 

            Eric had had a string of girlfriends in the time he had known Peter; Peter hadn’t a single relationship to speak of, not only in all that time but in all time. Peter had been courteous and gracious towards all of Eric’s girlfriends. But it was, perhaps, a thinking error on his part that he considered Eric his to share with them, they a succession of opportunists and imposters to whom he willingly gave over, willingly yielded a sizeable portion of his Eric.

            Typically, Eric was more charitably disposed towards Peter when he was in a relationship. Eric felt, to a certain extent, that Peter was a sort of adhesively attached, unwanted spectre from his past who lingered in his life, an appendage whose function he did not understand, a kind of social appendix. It was, he told himself, a little harsh to think of Peter in this way. But because of Peter’s enthusiasm for Eric, an enthusiasm that he didn’t quite understand, clumsy and pitiable in its obvious transparency, it made Peter a very difficult acquaintance to move on from. Eric wished he knew for sure whether or not Peter thought of him in a sexual way.

            In truth, Eric felt sorry for Peter. He was so gratified, so content in his relationship with Kate, so assured for the moment of his own happiness that empathy came to him with ease. It would soon be half a year that they had been going out. Eric cast his mind back over that time…Kate had moved into available position: Eric had taken swift advantage. He had her: sunshine lay bright in his life. At first, it was the hot white blaze of sex he enjoyed, of repeated intercourse with the same intercourse-partner, regenerative passion. Five months in, and the sunshine he felt around him was gentler, kinder. It was a feeling of promise: a hopeful feeling about the future. That was what he told himself at any rate. Given this blessed state of affairs, the gulf of difference between Peter’s life and his own became acute. So, knowing that Peter wanted to see him, he had extended an invitation to him, to come up North to his and Kate’s apartment and stay with the both of them for a weekend. That was the truth as far as Peter was concerned. Those parts relevant to Peter Eric had shared with him in a friendly text message that Peter had been delighted to receive. 

            This was Peter’s first-time meeting Kate. She tried to keep as open a mind as possible but she was quietly unoptimistic. Friends of her boyfriends’ regularly disappointed: she didn’t really know why. They never seemed to know how to be with her, seemed clueless as to what to do with her. Sometimes, it even seemed that they took her unavailability as a personal affront. But then again, though for very different reasons, there were at least two friends of Kate’s whom Eric could not stand. She was coming round to the point of view that the different sorts of acquaintance that make up a life, the different company one keeps, the different receptacles and generators of affection’s miscellaneous expressions were best kept as compartmentalised as possible. Colleagues were best kept away from friends; new friends, in her estimation, were best kept quite separate from old friends; lovers were best kept as far away as possible from everyone; family were best left alone and abandoned to decompose in their allotted corner. But it had been decided that Peter was to visit, this Peter to whom Eric alluded only very infrequently, and she was privately confident that he would buck the trend, enabling a pleasant, three-way friendship: Peter, Eric, Kate.  

            With all this mental anxiousness simmering, preluding Peter’s visit and even causing his finger to tremble a little as it hovered in hesitation over the intercom button, Peter pressed the button and the electric buzz of the bell sounded out his arrival. Waiting outside, at the door, impatient to be buzzed in, Peter thought he heard arguing voices over the intercom. He was taken a little aback at the lack of welcome. He’d expected to hear words of greeting over the radio. Instead, the line just went dead after a few long, pleading beeps. Then, after a few hissing seconds of static, the front door unlocked with a click and swung slowly, eerily open. Peter knew where he was to go. 4B. He ascertained quickly, interacting curtly with the sleepy security guard on the front desk, that the lift was broken. Having no choice but to do so, he took the stairs. The company name, Potrose Properties Ltd was written everywhere. The name repeated itself over and over again in Peter’s inner ear, especially that strange, compound, made-up opener: Potrose. The company insignia was a skeletal, geometric lighthouse. What did that have to do with Pots or Roses? What did these affordable urban properties in this landlocked city have to do with lighthouses, the sea, the shore, anything remotely maritime? It gave Peter a sense of being seen, watched, the fake frontal beam raying out from the image of this lighthouse saw you, it saw you, it didn’t help you to see. Like the name, the logo was everywhere, incongruous, wrong, ringing perfectly untrue on the walls. The walls were so long, so wide, so unadorned, so empty. There was so much wall space.

            Peter opened the door and left the carpeted stairwell behind him. Emerging onto the fourth floor, which was also carpeted but in a different pattern, he was met within seconds by an eager ginger cat. He bent, responsive to the cat’s overtures. But he was quick to recoil from the cat’s approach. It reeked. It also lacked a tail; to Peter’s mind an exceptionally disquieting amputation. It gave to this smelling, ginger cat a feeling of unnerving abbreviation. Peter stood up straight and let the cat pass. The cat briefly attempted to rub himself against Peter’s legs, to wreathe the squishy rectangular tail-less length of his body through them. But Peter walked on and the cat seemed to understand the rejection, accepting it with emotionless grace.  

            When Peter reached 4B, the door was already open and someone, whom he correctly took to be Eric, was standing outside, waiting. Peter squinted at the figure in the hallway (he normally wore glasses but had misplaced them). He sensed Eric before he saw him, he discerned his weight, and shape, and carriage before the familiar appearance made itself visible to him. Eric’s hair often changed, cut and shade. In the months during which they didn’t see each other, typically preceding and following any meeting, Eric’s hair might go from short, cut, kempt to a wild mop of curls and vice versa, or from its natural blondness to a dyed brown (and back again). This time, Eric’s hair was short and natural in shade. It fit snugly on his head, like a skullcap, doing nothing to obscure his attractive cranial proportions. It was quite a dainty head. Peter came from a large-headed family, this differentiated him from Eric. Visually, on this occasion anyway, Eric’s head reminded Peter of Kenneth Williams’s head. It was the first time Eric’s appearance had suggested the comparison to him. Peter was a straight-haired blond who often left far too much time between haircuts. He didn’t like to be bound into the barber’s chair, straitjacketed into the black, silken cape and bib, stilled in the firm hold of the barber’s hands, unable to escape his scissors and his razors and his generous dashes of product and his intermittent small talk. Eric saw Peter coming along the corridor and he raised his hand in welcome. 

            “Hello, Peter,” Eric said, waving. 

            “Hello, Eric,” Peter replied. They embraced.

            Nestled against Eric’s brittle, bony shoulder, Peter heard footsteps and looked up. A young woman was approaching from within the apartment, advancing towards the entrance. She had a bundle in her arms. The bundle meowed. When the woman had got quite close, Peter found himself able to smell the bundle. 

            “But…” he began to say. He couldn’t understand how the cat had ended up inside apartment 4B. “I just saw him”.  

            “He’s called Maze.” Kate said.

            “Maisy?” Peter answered.

            “No. He’s a He. And he’s called Maze. He’s mine.”

            “Right,” Peter said. It always felt awkward to him, to begin with any exchange other than a greeting when meeting someone for the first time. He quickly course-corrected, conversationally speaking:

            “I’m Peter,” Peter said.

            “I’m Kate,” Kate said. “Nice to meet you.”

            “Yes,” said Peter.  

            “Please, come in,” Kate said.

            Kate was quite petite. She was dark haired, very dark haired, some might even have said raven-haired. Her skin was very white against the darkness of her hair. She was very skinny. Almost too skinny, Peter couldn’t help thinking. Objectively speaking, she was good-looking. Peter didn’t personally find her beautiful but he didn’t find it hard to imagine and acknowledge that a lot of people would, and he didn’t struggle to understand why. 

Then he had the thought that Eric’s girlfriends were so physically and visually diverse that it was a complete enigma to Peter what it was that Eric looked for in women. It was as though they were chosen for him by someone else, chosen according to strange, changing, nebulous criteria. There was no girlfriend through-line, no feature or element common to them beyond their sex; together they formed a list of women whom Peter found suspiciously various, practically a cross-section of womankind. Peter had the strange expectation, the curious stipulation that a man’s sexual partners should be somehow congruent: that if one were to assemble all the women a particular man had ever been with in a small room (from which they couldn’t escape, and within which they couldn’t get too far apart for ease of comparison) their poignant similarity would show perfectly clearly, the tastes and attributes fetishized in the mind of the man whose sexual history they formed would all plainly tell. Not so in Eric’s case, Peter thought. Clarissa had been ridiculously tall, with ruddy, curly hair. Maria had been quite small, and blonde as a buttercup. All those that had come before Maria, Peter had just about completely forgotten. Eric too, he admitted in candour not that long ago. 

            The cat spilled abruptly from Kate’s arms. It looked like an accident, something clumsy and ungainly, a parting not agreed upon. If Maze had been a plate as opposed to cat, he would have shattered, Peter was quite sure. Indeed the floors were hard, wooded. Maze dropped to the ground with a percussive clap of claws on wood. The sudden sound sent a kind of trembling pang through all the apartment. The cat scurried off, taking his smell and his disturbing tail-less-ness with him, leaving Peter, Eric, and Kate alone at the threshold, looking at each other. 

            They had nothing to do with each other, the sharp sound that the cat had made dropping to the ground from Kate’s arms, and the feeling that Peter began to feel, but he couldn’t shake the notion that the latter had been somehow engendered by the former. Tightly clad to this odorous, tail-less cat, emanating from it unignorably was something cautionary. The sound of slow, apparently slouching footsteps upstairs drew Peter’s gaze ceilingward.   

            “Come in,” Kate said again.

            “Yes, come in,” Eric agreed, placing his right arm around Kate’s shoulder as soon as she was standing next to him. 

            For a moment, Peter was lost for words. He didn’t know how to articulate what he felt, this new trepidation. He suddenly found that, quite simply, he didn’t want to go in.

            He looked down at his feet. He was still out in the hallway. The hallway was carpeted, the apartment wood panelled, so he’d know by the sound of his footfalls when the threshold had been crossed. Unable to voice his trepidation, he crossed it, and the sound of his footsteps changed accordingly.

            Within, he was treated well. He was shown to the small spare room, tiny, austere, but perfect for a weekend sojourn, where he shed the satchel that had been upon his back all day before quickly following his hosts into the living room. There he was offered the most comfortable seat, the armchair with footrest. Kate and Eric seated themselves on the sofa. The cat stalked around the room, the tail, as ever, unnervingly absent. Peter’s nose noted the stink but he felt unable to point it out. Of all the things he feared being, rude struck in him the greatest terror. Both Kate and Eric seemed utterly oblivious to the smell. 

Occupying his mind with other matters, Peter felt a sense of height, a sense of the three storeys below him, between him and the ground. The din of the city was continuous, a grey kind of brook, urban, babbling, composed of footfalls, voices, buses, trams. He was aware of a skyey light, a closeness to the solid, grey brightness of the sky, overcast though not sunless, and the general, forest-like leap of high buildings all around.

            On their sofa Kate and Eric’s body language was a little cool. Eric would seek her and she would shift position, shuffle subtly right. They treated Peter to a good bottle of wine, red. They and Peter each dutifully, and rather mathematically, drank their allotted third of the bottle and they conversed, their conversation growing gradually warm and free with wine, the soft glow that mutual wine is able, more so than beer, to place beneath a conversation, like a source of heat, a few warm embers. Kate would occasionally retire. She went upstairs once or twice, saying she had to speak to a man whom she called “Barney”.  

They chose cinema for their evening outing. That was the supposed truth. There was a new film on at the Picturehouse directed by Logus Yantoporou, a filmmaker whose oeuvre held some, some only fairly faint mutual interest. It was unsurprising that they chose cinema over theatre for their pleasure, but it was quite unexpected, in Peter’s mind at any rate, that orchestral concerts, of which there were many in that part of the world, seemed to have lost much of their native appeal for Eric. Peter went from perfect contentment to some state a little colder. He’d been enjoying himself: now he was not. He only half-believed in Eric’s news enthusiasm for the movies, tended to find it a forced, false façade maintained only to appeal to the ludicrously avid film buff in Kate. Her BA had been in English Literature but she’d completed and attained highly in a joint module with the film department, after which she had grown ardently jealous of the film studies students, the nerdy, enjoyable, easeful academic life they led. She had not been permitted to change degree by the higher-ups at York and this particular resentment she seemed to carry about with her.  

            Though it had been explained to him more than once, Peter didn’t really understand how Kate and Eric knew each other, how they had met. He understood that they had a mutual friend, this Barney who kept entering the conversation with irritating, inopportune, and detracting frequency, but the exact nature of this so-called Barney, this “mutual friend”, what function he served, how they came to possess him, all remained a mystery to Peter. They went to eat at a Moroccan restaurant Kate and Eric esteemed. Peter wasn’t especially fond of chickpeas. As at any Moroccan restaurant, avoiding them proved a difficult feat, but he kept the struggle to himself, settling on a lamb tagine which came with lots of deeply flavoured tomatoes and pinenuts patterned on top of the meat. 

            They drank some more wine in the restaurant and ordered gin and tonics at the cinema bar before they went into their screen. The showing was not busy. Once the adverts and trailers were over, the lights darkened and they all felt curiously alone, but curiously connected as they sat there in three-wise obscurity. On the screen, after an endless sequence of logos (independent, international co-productions, Peter whispered to Eric, always have a ridiculous number of financing bodies to pay homage to)- the camera drifted calmly into the pretty, empty lives of these two suburban American, married couples. Both willingly childless, the film quickly revealed them to be swingers. 

            Eric and Kate watched the first sex scene with grim dispassion. They were quite unresponsive throughout, although for some reason Kate laughed at a poetical, peaceful shot that showed a little tortoise, a pet belonging to one of the two couples, making his slow, cumbersome progress across the bedroom floor. The tortoise crept sluggishly along on his inelegant, pudgy legs while the sound of what the camera had cut away from loudly occurred off screen: a wild, anguished come-cry of staggering emotional complexity for the comer. 

            During the second of the film’s sexually explicit scenes, of which there were to be many, Kate grasped Eric’s leg and her hand pressed down hard on the spot it had chosen for contact. It was as if she were anchoring her palm in place to prevent it from wandering to zones more sensitive, more charged, more erogenous. Peter observed this behaviour out of the corner of his eye, feigning total obliviousness to it. After a few moments they kissed, Eric and Kate, quite phonily Peter thought, intent as they were upon one another, fervent as they made their kisses seem. Amazing how cold the intimacies of others leave one, Peter thought. Then he countered this thought with the admission that there was nothing “amazing” about it at all. Then, Eric took abrupt hold of Kate’s cheeks in his hands, only to hastily loosen his grasp and slide his hands symmetrically down onto her breasts. Then, he grasped her two breasts through her blouse with great intention only to sharply withdraw from her and sulkily return to his seat, reclining into it, facing the screen. Kate’s firmly planted hand was shaken off in this manoeuvre. Kate and Eric whispered to each other, back and forth, a few times. Peter wished they’d quieten, and calm back down to their original stillness. He tried to catch what they said in their lowered voices but was unable to. By the 1 hour 10 minute mark, the swingers were deeply in love, all four of them, with the one they could only be with for a few hours. At the 1 hour 19 minute mark, for the first time that evening, Peter went to the toilet. When he returned he drank the rest of his drink. Within twenty minutes he felt sleepy. By the end of the film he was struggling to keep his eyes open, his entire being was spanned by that lulled, wilting feeling, his eyes kept closing, his mouth kept yawning open, his head kept falling back, or falling forward, nodding sleepily.                                                            

Peter was barely conscious by the time they got back to 4A. There had been a man begging on the tram. Kate had looked at him strangely before searching in her pocket for change; before dropping the change into the man’s dirty polystyrene cup, she had looked at it, studied it- as if trying to answer the question of whether or not it was enough. He didn’t seem that thankful. Eric noticed this and was somehow discouraged by it; Peter was too tired to care. He felt sad, spent, ill with drink and food and excitement- and exhausted by having to pretend at every point to be more sober than he was so as not to seem of a puny constitution. But he felt tranquil in a way, as the tram trundled along the street in darkness, slowing and accelerating with jerky suddenness. The need he felt for sleep was a comforting feeling, he trusted the impulse towards it. Through the windows of the tram, he observed how streetlight and stars all blurred. He found that he couldn’t discern the component parts of the city’s panoply, one building from another, one façade in a line of facades, one single source of light from the general array. 

            Accompanied by its usual odour, the cat was waiting for them when they reached the fourth floor. The lift remained out of order. The security guard said that it would be fixed at some point over the next forty-eight hours. This was his second time offering the assurance; the last time was a little under forty-eight hours before. Eric did not point this out. The security guard bade the three of them Goodnight. Eric and Kate stiffly reciprocated. Having no choice but to walk, to trudge upward and upward to the fourth storey of the building, they were all weary, and uninterested in the cat’s solicitations for caressive affection. Peter did not forget the name that Kate had given him for the cat, Maze, but he didn’t find himself able to believe in his heart of hearts that Maze really was the cat’s name. He pondered the possibility that it some kind of barb or joke at his expense.

            “I’m going upstairs,” Kate said out of nowhere. “Barney’s got…” she seemed to be searching for the words she would utter next. Like a lot of what she said, what she said this time didn’t ring terribly true. “…tupperware. I’m going to get my tupperware.” 

            She went back into the stairwell and ascended. Within moments she was out of sight. Peter had little interest in her activities. He did feel as though he might be on the brink of pointing out the stench of the cat to Eric. But as usual, as with so many things, he kept silent: what he wanted to say remained unsaid.

            Before passing out, Peter just had time to sense Kate come back down and enter 4A, a full tote bag in her arms. She wasn’t holding it by her side, by the straps; she was holding it like a paper bag of vegetables, or a baby, supporting it from beneath. Whatever was in the tote bag rattled, rattled, like a portable cabinet of pill jars. 

            “Sh sh sh,” Eric uttered, softly. Then again, “Ssh, sshhh.” 

            Successfully, his low, fricative incantation dispelled all distractions. Though Peter thought he remembered some mention of a spare room, Peter wasn’t sure which bed he suddenly found himself in but he recognised that he was now in a bed, and horizontal, his upper back and head-neck area propped up on two stacked cushions. He decided that this said spare room was his current location. A moment later he became aware of a hot, wet, acrid warmth upon his face, a patch of folded material pressed like a mask over his nose. There was an acidic sting. Then an overpowering, anaesthetising swoon quickly carried him off and dropped him into medical sleep.

            Eric and Kate stood back from Peter. His face lay sort of crumpled. His sleep was induced and perfunctory and so his features had a look of the inorganic about them, the suddenness of fright, of incomprehension. After about a minute he began to snore loud, nasal, slightly uncomfortable sounding snores. Kate rebottled the etherising agent and disposed of the cloth she had used. The cat came strolling by. Eric shooed it off with his foot. They didn’t want witnesses, even feline ones, as they took the straitjacket that Kate had obtained from Barney, a psychiatric nurse, out of the tote bag. Together, in an act of unscrupulous, amorous unity, they put the straitjacket upon Eric’s friend. They made it loose, they slid it down until Peter’s torso and his arms were tightly bound within it. Then, very carefully, one by one, they securely fastened each buckled strap. In the tote bag which Kate was quick to stow away in the vacuum cupboard, were many weeks of strong sedative medication, and general anaesthetic. Lacking whiskey in their booze cabinet, they each had a neat gin, a strong, citric, specialised gin, local to Eric and Peter’s part of the world, where they had grown up, where Peter still was- though not this night. They were both of them, Eric and Kate, very silent. Kate seemed tacitly elated, in a wordless trance of elation. Eric sipped, his face grim and unquiet with the dumbness of his acquiescence. Inspired by the singular and piquant pang of this gin that he had brought back with him early in the new year from a visit home, he felt a spreading feeling that he felt only infrequently: deep within him, deep as his loins he felt it: he missed his home. He looked at Kate, with a hardness that wasn’t love, but was perhaps its cousin. He gazed upon this woman he’d made his co-tenant, found this place with, signed the lease with, rented it with, cohabited with. She didn’t notice him looking at her at first. She was candid, solemn, serene, profiled. Then she turned, she looked right back at him. Her eyes were dark and shining, her hair blackly glistening and a little windblown, a little weathered. Eric recognised that he had made this woman his life. He decided to desire her and found that the power of his being able to choose excited him. He declared his interest in sex a little abruptly.

            Within the rapture of coitus, its suddenness, they didn’t even notice when the cat sauntered by. The cat even stopped, stared with deadpan, inter-species fascination and a whiskered snivelling at their love-making, inspecting it carefully. Then he stalked on, investigating the spare room. He leapt up onto the bed like a liquid in reverse. He clambered onto Peter, unconscious, bound, and curled up, deciding promptly to doze. He slept, tail-less, reeking, right on Peter’s straitjacketed torso. The looped pile of cat rose and fell, rose and fell with Peter’s breaths.

            The uncomfortableness of the sofa pissed Eric off. It wasn’t a big sofa, it was a handy but unideal vessel for copulation. The awkward discomfort injected a desperation into his efforts. He thought he’d chosen desire, but really desire had chosen him, had chosen him and Kate for fierce subjects, fierce brief devotees. It was out of their hands. The strange, lonely young man, the lukewarm friend, bound and straitjacketed in the spare room close by, upheld and fed them with his presence. It did nothing to dissuade Eric, as he looked down at Kate, as she looked up at him. She jerked with his hastening, staccato thrusts. The curious silliness of sex, the perfunctory mechanics of it when it lacked romance could so easily overwhelm the act, the physics of the dream, and discourage Eric. But something was carrying him this time, urging him on, refusing to let him wilt or retire. He felt strengthened. He felt steady and assured, able to make beautiful to himself and to Kate the missionary closeness of faces, the horizontal confrontation of man and woman. 

Hours after it was over and Kate and Eric had gone to bed, Kate woke again. She woke with a start, some crunch of disquiet dislodged her from sleep. It was as though she had woken from a nightmare, or been woken from a bad dream. And yet it wasn’t like that. She remained dreamlike as she walked, she remained in the dream. Her steps were ghostly, tranced, as was her quiet passing through the blue, dark corridor, out and into rooms, from the hush of one room to another, in her white, silk nighty against which her hair was blacker than jet. Her hair danced in tiny motions, it swung like a pendulum at the back, and a few lone strands stood up and shimmered in the night. The distant hum of night traffic went on but almost imperceptibly. Her sweeping sleepwalk led her to the spare room. Peter remained comatose, bound. 

Kate thought of Barney. The nasty god, up the stairs, who ruled over their lives, hers, Eric’s, even Peter’s now. Why did they clutch at him so desperately, his authority? Why was obedience, unswerving obeisance to his obscure demands the only solution to the crisis of their lives, the only solving grace in a hard, confusing world? She winced, she shivered to think of the slow dawning she had experienced, how gradually, how sinkingly life had dawned on her, its realness, its difficulties. Barney told them what to do and would continue to tell them what to do: for payment he had asked for a sacrifice, for a pale haunted loser to be lured and to be placed in the spare room of their apartment, a room whose extra square feet he had taken it upon himself to finance. Barney was a psychiatric nurse, should it suit them for him to be one. He was also a businessman, a salesman, a pimp, a computer hacker, an impresario, a magician, a wizard of sorts. He was whatever they needed him to be. He owned this building. It was his private building. Potrose Properties Ltd was just a bogus front. He was the security guard but tenants were forbidden from calling him Barney when he was tending the front desk. He liked to laze around in the reception area, his feet up on the desk, territorial, like a dog, sitting on his property, languidly owning it. He had had the lift wantonly destroyed, he had cut off Maze’s tail with his own hands, had forbade them from washing him, forced Kate and Eric to take him into their residence, all for his own amusement.

Kate seated herself on the edge of the bed, beside Peter. She had immediately noticed Maze looped in sleep on Peter’s stomach. Her first impulse was to rouse and eject the cat but she didn’t do that. She felt oddly tender towards him, he took on a strange, unhuman fraternity. He was an abused creature, he understood her suffering, she his, he suffered with her, she with him. She knew that he smelled, so did Eric. But they were banned from acknowledging it. It gave Barney pleasure, the very idea of them suffering silently. Kate laid her head in her hands. Her hands tautened with effort, as though she were holding, holding down in place the weight of all the shame and revulsion and sadness that she felt, that she felt everyday. She was resigned to this life and she knew it, she knew that she no longer had the strength to fight against it, lacked the resolve to hack her way out of it. 

Then, something caught her eye, some detail, some nuance in Peter’s face. He was happy: he was happy! His features had relaxed into undeniable contentment. On his lips, there was a beautiful, soft smile, somnolent, beatific, jocund. It was a smile of unawareness, because he was unaware of what had been done to him, the deception and plight visited upon him. But it was a smile born also from that of which he was aware and had been aware: how attended to, how accommodated, how loved he felt. For some reason, Kate felt the urge to touch his hair. She felt strangely attracted to his handsome sleep, to his blondness. She caressed his hair, feeling so free, so free she was almost flying. She felt tenderness, unsexual, unusual, generous tenderness for this new third element in their life, hers and Eric’s. The choice was not hers. But she didn’t care. She was looking forward to their new life together. There would be joy and gentleness and charity and family and laughter within it. She even had faith that Peter would forgive Eric for his betrayal. Kate decided that she would care for Peter, for as long as she was able, that she would make it her mission to be good to him. She would console him when he woke: morning was not so far away. She faced the future with steadfast courage, finding it exciting. She would be there, at the side of the bed, waiting for him, waiting and ready to tend to him and calm him when morning broke revealing his new tyranny to him and his place within it.