The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps. Michel Faber
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at a slit in a stranger’s door, preparing to slide a foreign object through it. What if the door should open suddenly, to reveal Magnus, still naked and warm from his bed, rubbing his eyes? Or what about the dog? Surely he would go berserk at the sound of her fumblings at the mail slot! Siân steeled her nerves for an explosion of barking as she fed the books and pamphlets, one by one, through the dark vent, but they dropped softly onto the floor within, and that was all. Hadrian was either uninspired by the challenges of being a guard dog, or asleep. Asleep on the bed of his master, perhaps. Two muscular males nestled side by side, different species but both devilishly handsome.
For goodness’ sake, she sighed to herself, turning away. When will you grow up?
Bag empty and weightless on her shoulder, she hurried back to the hotel.
Siân had never been fond of weekends. They were all very well for people with hobbies or a frustrated desire to luxuriate in bed, but she would rather be working. Half the reason she’d switched from paper conservation to archaeology was that it required her to show up, no matter what, at the appointed hour, and dig. It wasn’t easy, especially in raw weather, but it was better than wasting the whole day thinking about the past – her own past, that is.
Saint Benedict had the right idea: a community of monastics keeping to a strict ritual seven days a week, helping each other get out of bed with (as he put it) ‘gentle encouragement, on account of the excuses to which the sleepy are addicted’. Siân knew all about those.
To prevent herself moping, she spent most of her weekends wandering around Whitby, back and forth across the swing bridge, from pier to pier, from cliff to cliff. She’d walk until she tired herself out, and then lie on her bed in the Mary Ann Hepworth room with a book on her lap, watching the roof-tops change colour, until it was time for her to go to sleep and get what was coming to her.
This week, Saturday passed more quickly than usual. Her early-morning excursion to the house in Loggerhead’s Yard had been quite thrilling in its stealthy way, and afterwards she fell into a long, mercifully dreamless doze. She woke quite rested, with only three-quarters of the weekend left to endure.
In the afternoon, while she had a bite of lunch at the Whitby Mission and Seafarer’s Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice-board near the door. ‘Don’t leave Fido out in the cold,’ said one fluttering page. ‘We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome.’ Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with strange owners looked up at the newcomer.
On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the book-case offering books for 50p each, and rummaged through the thrillers, romances and anthologies of local writers’ circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a come-down since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen-nibs.
‘Now here’s a blast from the past!’ brayed the disc jockey on the radio. ‘Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit – come on,’ fess up!’
Siân fled.
Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily-washed hair steaming. She couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going – at exactly the same time as she’d set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.
She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again – twice – but no chance meeting occurred.
Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon’s Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.
‘Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,’ the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, ‘was give sanctuary to murderers.’
Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid’s eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks’ trod.
‘Has Whitby got McDonalds,’ he asked his dad, ‘or only fish and chips?’
It was Monday afternoon before Siân saw Magnus again. In the morning, she loitered around the town centre before work, in an irritable, shaky state. Her nightmare hadn’t yet receded, and her throat was sore where, in a befuddled attempt to deflect the knife, she had hit herself with her own hand. The lump in her thigh throbbed like hell.
In the town’s deserted market square, on a bench, someone had discarded a copy of the current Whitby Gazette. With half an hour still to kill before 8 a.m., Siân settled down to read it. For some reason though, every single article in the Gazette struck her as monumentally depressing. Not just the sad stories, like the one about the much-loved local janitor dying of cancer (‘He never moaned about his illness and was always cheerful’, according to a colleague – a chip off Saint Hilda’s block, then). No, even the stories about a holidaymaker being struck by lightning and surviving, or a charity snail-eating contest, or the long-overdue restoration of Egton Bridge, brought Siân closer and closer to irrational tears. She flipped the pages faster, through the property section, until she was on the back page, staring at an advertisement for a beauty clinic on the West Cliff. ‘Sun-dome with facial and leg boosters’ it said, and to Siân this seemed like the most heartbreakingly sad phrase she’d ever read this side of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Get a grip, she counselled herself, and laid the paper aside. She noticed that someone had joined her on the bench: an obese, spiky-haired punkette, an unusual sight in Whitby – almost as unusual as a monk. Siân goggled just a few seconds too long at the infestation of silver piercings on the girl’s brow, nose and ears, and was given a warning scowl in return. Chastened, she looked down. At the punkette’s feet sat a dog, to help the girl beg perhaps. Apart from the pictogram for ‘anarchy’ doodled on his wheat-coloured flank in black felt-tip, he was a very ordinary-looking dog, a Labrador maybe – nowhere near as beautiful as Hadrian.
Face it: compared to Hadrian, every other dog was plain.
At ten to eight, Siân began to climb the hundred and ninety-nine steps and, gazing for a moment across the harbour, she suddenly spotted Hadrian and Magnus on the other side, two tiny figures sprinting along Marine Parade. Her melancholy turned at once to a sort of indignant excitement. Why would they choose there to run instead of here on her side? They must be avoiding her! Surely nobody could prefer the stink of raw fish and the pierside’s dismal panorama of amusement parlours and pubs to what lay at the foot of the church steps …
Her sudden, fervid impulse to jump up and down and wave to Mack, despite the fact that there was no chance of him noticing, alarmed her – clearly, she was farther gone than she’d thought, and should make an immediate start on restoring her sanity before it was too late.
I am here, she reminded herself, to work. I am not here to be torn apart. I am not here to be treated like dirt.
She imagined her emotions embodied in the form of a hysterical novice nun, and her judgement as the wise and kindly abbess, counselling restraint. She visualised the bare interior of one of Saint Hilda’s prayer-cells lit up gold and amber with sunbeams, a merciful ebbing away of confusion, a soul at peace.
* * *
When Siân reached the burial site, Pru was already lifting off the blue tarpaulins, exposing the damp soil. Towards the edges of the excavation, the clay was somewhat soggier than it needed to be, having