An old piece; circa 2010(?) (I really should have kept records.)
On Monday, it takes seventeen minutes ten to climb the stairs. The ducts turn the soundless breeze outside into a distant headfucking death wail; drifts of dirt and litter smooth the corners out of architecture, turning the tower block into a burrow, a slovenly animal warren.
Sam's trainers hit the stairs, step at a time, a regular thump with an alternating hiss of air escaping the gash in the left sole. Each step a curse, on the makers of lifts that break, on the children of makers of lifts that break, on the cats and dogs of makers of lifts that break, on their houses and cars and grandkids and TVs and so on and so forth. Sam's feet hurting already from standing all day, and it turns out that the makers of broken lifts have a lot of stuff in their lives.
She almost passes the crack in the wall without seeing. A wavy vertical line, black in the concrete's grey, almost invisible under dying fluorescents. It's the moist glisten within that catches her eye, hint of wetness in a cement desert.
"Fucking shitheap," she mumbles. "Fucking damp, fucking leaking shit."
On Tuesday, it takes an even twenty minutes to climb the stairs, disintegrating shoe grinding sore spots into Sam's heel. The crack is longer, darker even though it's still only a hairline. Sam squints at it, pauses, moves her head until it glistens once again. She runs a hand the length of it, comes away grimy from the wall but devoid of moisture.
"Weird."
Key in the door, and home surrounds her. It ought to feel different, like shrugging off the day, kicking back and being a person at home. It isn't. There's a pile of shoes under the coat rack, none hers. Some are Tinker's. Some are Kerr's. Some have been left by guests and friends, forgotten or to be collected sometime later. Some are Andrea's, and Sam glares at them. They might think she doesn't know, that she takes Kerr's guilt-unburdened curve into her arms every night in ignorance; she doesn't. Andrea's fucking her girl every chance she gets, and Kerr loves it, the sneaking and hiding, the thrill. She must know that sooner or later, there will be trouble; and that's probably making it sweeter. Kerr's a bad trip, a very bad trip, and Sam's a sucker.
On Wednesday, they pull same-shit-different-day at work, and it's an extra hour before she even gets to the bottom of the stairs. The crack might be wider, or it might just be blacker. It looks as wet as a brimming eye, but her hand still comes away grimy and dry. The left shoe gapes like a goldfish or a porn star every time she moves her foot, and hurts like stepping on Lego.
There's a draught, a shocking cold blade of air drifting out of the crack.
"Fuck." It's probably structural, kill them all in the middle of a random night. Air like that has to be from outside, even if she can't figure how. All these shitbox flats are the same, and if this was their floor, it'd be through their bathroom wall.
It doesn't feel that cold outside. Must be the same bullshit that makes the ducts scream.
Twenty-two minutes forty.
Her shoe bisects on Thursday morning. Payday's a week off, she's a cheap pair of trainers into the overdraft, and the unpaid time the night before cuts no ice; forty-five minutes to buy shoes knocks an hour off her wages. After the overdraft charges, next month will end in the red too. Same-shit all over again.
Her heel's so raw that the new shoe hurts like the old one, and she climbs the stairs with the backs of her ankles flayed. Twelve minutes four to get as far as the crack in the wall, now filling an entire flight with wintry chill, snaking floor to ceiling. It shimmers wetly.
She needs a break from ruining her feet anyway, so Sam stops and plants a palm on the grubby wall. She leans in, looks close. The shimmer's elusive for a second, the crack pitch black, so she tilts her head, trying to get the light to hit the wetness that must be in there —
Lightheaded now, like a double shift with no time for lunch. She looks at the perishing plastic watch on the wrist raised in front of her, drops her leaden arm. Stares at the outside of the apartment door. Realising she has no idea what time it is, she lifts her arm again. Thirty...thirty-eight minutes two?
She doesn't remember walking up the last three flights. Remembers the crack, the cold, but then.... She was going to stop and have a look at the crack. Must have been asleep on her feet, Christ knows how she even got this far this fuzzy.
Straight to bed, then, and two fingers to the rest of the day.
She jolts awake twice, shaking and electrified, so sudden she doesn't even know if this is fear or rage or exultation. She was dreaming, but nothing's left of them in her head but the conviction that they were more vivid than life. The third time she wakes up talking. All that her mouth's actually been forming is urgent, sleepy baby-noises. It's somehow bitterly disappointing that she couldn't even bring some lousy words back.
Friday, Zeno's paradoxical slog towards the weekend. Feet ineffectively patched up with plasters, broken sleep mended just as well with coffee, Sam limps through her shift. She salves her exhaustion with custard doughnuts on the way home. The money that could be better spent, but the money could always be better spent, and does Kerr ever consider it?
Off the clock, but about twenty minutes to reach the crack. She plants her lousy, painful feet, settles against the opposite wall, and stares hard while she chews rebelliously through a whole bagful of comfort eating. If she moves her head a little to the side, the glisten winks on and off. She's sure she could see the water if she got close, maybe with a torch, and found the right angle. If she holds her head just so, then tilts is slightly, the wet glint slides from top to bottom of the crack, and with a reversed tilt, back from floor to ceiling. So perhaps if she held her head just so and then swayed slightly to the side, the light would be at the right angle and the glint would spread along it from top to bottom —
Her eyes are burning, as if she hasn't blinked for far too long, the TV swimming in front of her vision. The room's dark, the couch is uncomfortable under her. Sam blinks frantically, every part of her body weighing ten times what it ought, like a particularly vile hangover. She has to bring her watch within inches of her nose to focus on it, and has to painfully raise her arm twice more as the numbers slip from her head the moment they're not in front of her eyes.
It's nearly midnight.
She checks again, suddenly terrified because she has no idea if it's even the same day, but it is. Christ, the job must be killing her; no idea whether she's eaten, no clear idea how she got home, no memory at all of sitting and staring at the TV as her eyes dried out....
She wakes once, sweating and unsettled, and Kerr wakes her the second time; says Sam's eyes were open in her sleep, that she was "talking funny". Groggy from sleep and with the fading tatters of sharp dreams behind her eyes, impossible to retain, Sam mumbles something about nightmares and work and stress. She turns over. She plunges back into unconsciousness.
Saturday is the usual farce of inefficiency: the busiest day of the retail week, when the weekend staff, perpetually-inexperienced from their only-one-shift-per-week, are ritually overwhelmed by sheer footfall. Sam drags herself home, vision tunnelled by exhaustion and slow-grinding bile. Every flight ends in a long pause, internal pep-talk, and grudging concession to the necessity of the next. Thirty or maybe forty minutes to reach the crack.
Wasn't she planning to stop and take a look at this yesterday?
The cold is intense, and there's a faint smell hanging in the air. Like winter. Like brushed metal. Like salt. Difficult to define. She takes deep nosefuls; it leaves a harsh taste on the back of her throat, but remains unidentifiable.
The crack is dark and definite, with a glossy shine within. It must be water. Why it doesn't leak out, she can't imagine. Perhaps if she can get a nail far enough in, break the surface tension; just for her own satisfaction, because this shitheap thing has been bugging her all week.
The crack is narrow, and the air seeping from it is freezing. She scrabbles, trying to get her nails to wedge into it. Just the tips lodged against it, straining for more purchase —
Something gives fractionally under her grim straining.
Oh, the trouble she'll be in for widening a structural crack, is her first wild thought, even before it occurs that she'll probably just die under the block's collapse. But no. The crack seems wider, perhaps — she's sure she felt it widen — but there's no hideous grinding or rumbling, no falling masonry or even dust, nothing.
And there's that tantalising glint, seeming tantalisingly easier to glimpse, but somehow just as difficult now to actually see. She hesitates. Reapplies her nails to the fissure, braces, and hauls.
And as the crack seems to shift again under her effort, something bright snaps into focus that's not quite water and not quite light—
When Kerr eventually goes looking, the stairs are wet. The crack — she remembers Sam saying something about the crack — is a hairline. Maybe not even really there at all. There are grimy handprints all over the wall around it.
One of Sam's shoes is abandoned on the landing.
Kerr tries Sam's phone. No answer, but Kerr could almost swear there's a faint, strange noise. She gingerly — telling herself she's being stupid — presses an ear to the wall.
She can't quite make herself believe that Sam's phone is vibrating inside the concrete, and so she never tries to make anyone else believe it either. She just keeps calling Sam's phone and listening to the strange, faint buzz through the concrete, until Sam's battery dies.