Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Stair with One More Step
A tenant keeps a ledger of how many steps run down to his cellar, and after dusk the number will not stay still.
- dated: October 1993
- narrator: Conrad Nye, tenant, Dyer Street
- reliability: unreliable
FRIDAY, 4TH
Counted the cellar stair by lamplight and logged it properly: eleven down, eleven up. Eleven is what the letting agent's plan says — I went and looked; there is a print of this terrace in a folder at the office, and under my number it says ELEVEN RISERS, in the draughtsman's neat hand, which is a comfort I did not know I needed until I needed it. Two entries in the ledger, both eleven, one struck through as a duplicate. Good. Clean.
MONDAY, 7TH
Counted at dusk, because I wanted a second count for the ledger and the light was going. Twelve going down. I stood at the bottom with my hand on the newel and made myself go back up, counting: twelve. Then an hour later, full dark, lamp lit, down again: eleven. Up: eleven. I wrote twelve above the eleven in the evening column and did not strike either through. Let the ledger carry both. Let the ledger take the blame if one of them is a lie.
THURSDAY, 10TH
Rules I have decided on, for the ledger's sake. One: never count in the same breath down and up, because the breath carries the number across. Two: never count among the day's other numbers; the count gets its own page. Three: count aloud, in the voice you'd use at a meter reading, absurd and clear, so the stair knows exactly where the count has got to.
Tonight: eleven down by lamplight. Twelve up. I checked the plan from memory and from memory it says eleven, and I noticed, writing that, that I had paused before the word eleven, the way you pause on a form before writing a figure you do not want to be responsible for.
SUNDAY, 13TH
Dusk. Twelve going down, and under my foot — I am nearly sure, and I have put nearly in because I want the record to be useful to somebody — the eighth riser was thicker. Not the same stone. Flagstones all the way, and the eighth was a flat one, like a landing cut too mean, and my heel knew it before I did. I have not gone past twelve in the ledger, and I am not going past twelve in the stair either. The trapdoor in the cellar floor is another building's business and I have not raised it, not once, because whatever the trap opens on, my ledger has no column for it.
MONDAY, 14TH
Writing this at the top of the stair instead of in the kitchen, which I said I would never do, because the kitchen is where the sensible copy gets made. Something has changed and I want it written while I know it. Tonight, dusk: eleven going down, twelve going up. That is the new one. A riser that exists coming up and not going down, which is the wrong way round for a stair and the right way round for a door. If there is a step that is only ever under the foot on the way out, then the stair is not miscounting. The stair is letting me out the long way, and charging me a step for the privilege.
The trapdoor below was ajar when I came up. I did not leave it ajar. I am not going to turn around now to count the stair behind me in the dark, because I find I am no longer afraid of the count coming out wrong. I am afraid of it coming out right, with one more, and there being no honest place in the plan to complain to. In the morning I will count from the kitchen, from the light, where the ledger lives. Whatever number I get will be one fewer than it is tonight, and I have stopped knowing which of the two numbers is lying — the plan's, or mine.