On the first day, there were five mugs in the caretaker's cupboard. Four were white. The fifth had a faded picture of a train pulling out of a station.
Mrs Petersen told me not to use the train.
“It leaks?” I asked.
“Just use a white one.”
She showed me where to turn off the water, how to stop the courtyard gate scraping, and which residents would telephone after ten about a television that was not loud. Then she gave me the keys and took her suitcase downstairs.
Her daughter was collecting her for a fortnight at the coast. I was covering because she had once covered for my mother at the school hostel. It was that kind of arrangement: the payment adequate, the debt older than I was.
At the door she turned back.
“Don't move the chair on the second landing.”
There were seven storeys in Vesper Court. Each landing had a window and a fire extinguisher. The second also had an upright wooden chair with a yellow cushion, facing the wall beneath the stairs.
I thought of someone recovering from an operation, needing a rest on the way up. The lift had been awaiting parts since April. I decided I would clean round it.
That night I heard a teaspoon going round a mug in the office.
I was in the room behind it, where the caretaker slept. I listened to three slow circuits, a pause, then three more. The sound had the clear, domestic irritation of a person making tea when they knew you were trying to sleep.
I opened the connecting door.
The office was dark. The mugs stood upside down in their cupboard. A slice of streetlight lay across the desk. I switched on the light and checked behind the filing cabinet, a ridiculous place for anyone with a teaspoon.
In the morning the train mug stood beside the kettle. It was dry.
I rang Mrs Petersen. Her daughter answered. They were on their way to breakfast, and the sea sounded loud enough to come through the telephone.
“She says put it away,” the daughter told me.
“Did she come back last night?”
There was a short discussion away from the receiver.
“Put it away upside down,” she said.
I did, and went to attend to a loose stair rail.
By eleven I had met the man in 5B, who refused to give his name because it was on the intercom. The student in 3C asked whether I could accept a parcel. A small woman in a burgundy tracksuit brought down two pears and placed them on the office desk.
“One for you,” she said.
She was at the door before I understood enough to ask about the other.
The building smelled of washing powder until the afternoon, then onions. Voices travelled clearly from the courtyard, but the stairs absorbed them. On the second landing I could hear somebody washing a large plate on the other side of the wall. The wall adjoined the air shaft.
I tightened the rail. The yellow cushion on the chair bore a shallow, square depression.
At six the student came for her parcel. Her name was Lebo. She was studying physiotherapy and had a habit of balancing on one leg while she talked.
“Who sits on the second landing?” I asked.
Her raised foot came down.
“It's a fire escape. Nobody's supposed to.”
“Mrs Petersen says leave the chair.”
“Then leave it.”
I tried a laugh. “Is this something you do to all the temporary staff?”
She looked past me at the open cupboard.
“You can knock on my door,” she said, “if you need someone.”
The way she said it annoyed me. I was forty-three. I had run a school kitchen through a water outage, buried both my parents, and once taken a taxi alone across a city I could not pronounce. I could manage two weeks in a block of flats.
At half past nine the teaspoon began again.
This time I stayed in bed. It went round three times, paused, and resumed. After a minute I heard a chair being drawn up to the desk.
There was no chair at the desk. Mrs Petersen had taken hers upstairs to lend a resident, and I was using a stool from the kitchen.
I switched on my bedside lamp.
The stirring stopped.
A voice on the other side of the door said, very politely, “Oh.”
It had not expected me to be awake.
I sat with my feet on the cold floor until morning.
No mug stood by the kettle. The second pear was gone. A small patch of damp marked the paper beneath it, as though the fruit had been lifted before the paper could dry.
At eight I carried the chair from the second landing into the storeroom.
It was ordinary varnished wood. A previous caretaker had written VC underneath the seat in thick black marker. The cushion smelt faintly of hair oil. I stacked two paint tins on it and locked the door.
The man from 5B found me sweeping the entrance.
“You'll have to put it back.”
“Chairs can't stay on fire escapes.”
“People need somewhere to wait.”
“Who?”
He showed me a face I had seen on teachers who did not know the answer but considered the question insolent.
“Ask Evelyn.”
“She's on holiday.”
“Then use your judgement.”
By lunchtime an elderly man was resting on the stairs below the second landing. He lived on the sixth floor. I helped him up and promised to chase the lift contractor. There was a reason for the chair, then. A sensible reason, one I should have considered before making myself useful.
I went to fetch it.
The paint tins stood on the storeroom floor. The chair was gone. Nothing else had moved. I checked the storeroom window, which was barred and too small for a chair, and then I checked the landing.
It was back beneath the stairs.
The cushion had turned over. Its underside was almost white except for two long marks, parallel and grey, as if something with wet trouser legs had been sitting there.
On Thursday I counted eight steps between the first and second landings. There had been nine on Wednesday. I knew because I had tightened the rail at the fourth and eighth brackets, one bracket above each step.
There were still nine brackets.
The last one now projected over the landing, where no hand would naturally reach it.
I counted again coming down. Eight. I took a photograph. In it there were nine steps. The bottom corner of the yellow cushion showed above the banister, though from where I stood the chair should have been hidden by the wall.
I sent the photograph to Mrs Petersen. Her reply came after lunch.
Please don't send more pictures. I am trying to have a holiday.
I typed three angry messages and deleted them. Then I wrote: I need to know what I am looking after.
This time she rang.
“Nobody died on those stairs,” she said before I could speak. “I checked. Everybody says someone died, but that isn't it.”
“What is it?”
“I don't know.”
Behind her a gull made a tearing sound.
“It was here when I came. Mr Africa told me leave the chair. I thought it was his joke. He said if it had a seat it wouldn't need to come inside.”
“There's someone drinking tea in your office.”
She did not answer.
“You knew.”
“I'm tired,” she said. “I'm seventy-one, Nora. I wanted to see the sea while I could still walk to it.”
I could have made that very easy for myself. I could have put down the phone and called her selfish, which would have given me something solid to be afraid of.
Instead I asked how long she had been taking it tea.
“Since winter.”
“Does it drink?”
“I don't stay.”
“And the pear?”
“Mrs Naidoo started those. I asked her to stop.”
“Why doesn't everyone move?”
She laughed once, without pleasure.
“Have you seen the rents?”
That evening I knocked on Lebo's door. She let me in without asking why. On her table lay a textbook open to the bones of the foot. All her chairs were occupied by laundry.
“I moved it once,” she said. “When I first came. I thought someone had dumped it.”
“What happened?”
“My flat got longer.”
She took me to her passage. It was short: bathroom, cupboard, bedroom. She could stand at the table and touch the bedroom frame with the end of a broom.
“For two nights I couldn't see my bed from here. The door was open, but there was too much dark between.”
“Did you go in?”
She shook her head.
“I slept here. It felt rude to put the light on. That's what scared me afterwards. Thinking I was being rude.”
On Friday Mrs Naidoo brought down a saucer with a biscuit on it. I thanked her and ate it before she left.
She watched me chewing.
“You mustn't be unkind.”
“Who am I being unkind to?”
Her fingers tightened on the empty saucer.
“Someone waiting.”
I went upstairs with her. On the second landing the chair stood farther from the wall than before. Behind it was a narrow strip of darkness which did not change when I moved my head. I put my torch on it. The wall around it brightened. The strip remained dark.
I could smell old tea.
Mrs Naidoo held my elbow. Very quietly she said, “I used to know.”
We stood there, both waiting for her to remember. On the floor between us appeared a pale square, then another, as though light from two high windows were reaching a corridor concealed behind the chair.
Someone at the far end cleared their throat.
Mrs Naidoo tried to step forward. I held her arm. She was surprisingly strong, twisting gently against me as if I were a branch she could get past without breaking.
“They've been so patient,” she said.
I took her upstairs by the other arm. At her door she asked why I had not brought her saucer.
By Saturday the second landing had room for a table.
There was no table yet. But the space was unmistakable: the chair at one end, an expanse of bare floor which I could not reconcile with the air shaft, and on the wall a clean rectangle where something ought to hang.
The building was preparing a room.
I rang the emergency number on my employment sheet. It belonged to a managing agent in another city. He asked whether there was structural damage. I said I did not know. He told me to send photographs.
Every photograph showed the original landing. The chair. Nine steps. Ordinary scuffed paint.
I packed my bag.
Before leaving I went up to tell Lebo. On the second landing the air was warm, and someone had put a cushion on the floor beside the chair. I recognised it from Mrs Naidoo's sofa.
From the strip of darkness came my own voice.
“There's no hurry.”
It sounded as I must have sounded in my mother's last weeks, sitting beside her bed with a glass of water she would not drink. I had never heard a recording of that voice. I knew it by the tenderness I had been unable to feel at the time, busy as I was keeping the glass upright.
I sat on the bottom step.
For several minutes there was nothing to do. My bag rested against my leg. Somewhere close by, a kettle was coming to the boil. I had the thought that I might put my head down, just until someone told me what was needed.
Then Lebo opened her door above me.
“Nora?”
I stood too fast and knocked my bag down the stairs. It struck every step. There were nine sounds.
Lebo came down and took my arm without asking. We went into her flat. This time she moved the laundry off a chair.
I told her about my mother. She told me about a practical exam she had failed, which had nothing to do with my mother and somehow made it possible to breathe. We talked until the kettle in the passage stopped before it boiled.
On Sunday I wrote a notice asking residents to bring their breakfast to the courtyard. I gave no reason. Mrs Naidoo brought pears. The man from 5B arrived with a newspaper, prepared to disapprove of something. The old man from the sixth floor brought a camping chair which he said he could have offered months ago if anybody had asked.
While they were eating, Lebo and I went to the second landing.
The chair was warm through the cushion. I lifted it. She lifted the cushion from the floor. We carried them down together, talking about where they would go, and put the wooden chair beside the camping chair in the courtyard.
Nobody sat in it. That was all right. There were people on both sides of it. Mrs Naidoo put a pear on its seat. I moved the pear to the table and cut it into quarters.
After breakfast we made a list for the managing agent. Lift. Rail. Damp. Things he could photograph. Lebo offered to carry groceries upstairs. The man from 5B gave us his name, which was David.
That night I heard the teaspoon again.
I got out of bed, knocked on Lebo's door and asked whether she wanted tea. We took two white mugs into the office. She read her textbook. I counted the receipts. Neither of us looked at the cupboard when something behind its closed door shifted very slowly against the wood.
Mrs Petersen came home on Tuesday, four days early. She had bought herself shoes with white soles. For a moment I hated her for coming back rested.
Then she saw the empty space beneath the second flight.
“You moved it.”
“It's in the courtyard.”
She sat down on the step. I sat beside her. In the wall ahead of us there was a hairline crack, no wider than a pencil mark.
“I shouldn't have left you alone,” she said.
Behind the crack, so faintly that we might have mistaken it for the pipes, somebody drew a long breath to speak.
I asked her about the sea.
She told me.
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