Stepping Out

by Peter Gifford

Mrs O’Donnell was either having sex or having a stroke. It was impossible to tell. Last time Miles heard the rhythmic thumping from the flat above, he'd assumed that she'd finally succeeded in enticing a delivery boy, or perhaps a vacumm cleaner salesman, into sampling her long-faded charms. After the banging had finally stopped, it was probably a good half hour before he heard the siren outside and people started standing in their doorways.

Funny, thought Miles, how the only time his neighbours talked to one another was when someone left in a stretcher. The stories passed like Chinese whispers until a final version was agreed upon — a junkie had overdosed in Room 103, the truck driver in 206 was explaining to the police how his wife had just ‘fallen over’, or maybe one of the older residents hadn’t been seen in a week and somebody noticed a funny smell about the place. Afterwards, when the young men in white uniforms had carried their burden into the lift and down to the lobby, the women with their hair in curlers and the men holding cigarettes with the ash about to fall stood and chatted for a while, sneaking over-the-shoulder peeks into their neighbours’ apartments. It wasn’t long before they ran out of things to say and the doors closed.

At these times Miles kept his door closed all through the incident, not wishing to join the orgy of petty gossip. He stayed hunched at the table pushed up against the window, sheets of paper spread out, scribbling furiously. Just like he did now.

Even when he wasn’t drawing, the fingers of his right hand stayed clenched together as though holding a pencil. When he stood his body curved in on itself like he was sitting at his table. Where others saw people, and streets, and shopfronts in three dimensions, he saw everything pinned out in two like butterfly specimens.

Now he looked at the paper before him and continued to sketch from memory, quickly filling in the details of Mrs O’Donnell’s face, with a few deft strokes pencilling in lines of disappointment and regret. The necklace lines around her neck, the cracked lips covered in cheap lipstick, and finally the eyes, empty of light. The thumping stopped.

Next door to Miles lived Paxton, a balding, skinny man in his forties who sometimes did something with computers for a living. A knock at Miles’ door pretty much meant it was Paxton.

“Hey Miles mate, let me in, it's bloody freezing out here.”

Miles shuffled to the door and pulled back the three bolts. The door was pushed in from the outside.

“Thanks.” Paxton strode into the room. He was a good head taller than Miles, even allowing for the latter’s hunch.

“Listen, do you have any beer? I really need a beer.”

Paxton was in the kitchen before he got the answer.

“In the fridge ...”

“Look Miles mate, it's been a hell of a day. You know that problem I was having with my hands —”

“— the RSI.” said Jones.

“Yeah, well — shit, it stinks in here — that’s what I thought it was. But the doctor had an x-ray done and today he tells me —” Paxton sat heavily onto Miles' faded couch "– well, I've got some kind of bone disease. Apparently."

Miles saw Paxton’s face fall like a switch had been thrown. He resisted the urge to run for his sketchpad.

“Not that he knows what disease exactly. Just says my bones look funny. Great. years of medical school, 120 bucks a visit and all he can tell me is they look funny.” Paxton lifted his hand and looked at it, lifting the beer to his lips with the other. “Funny,” he said.

Miles sat again at his table. There was a soft, lonely thump from the flat above.

“You get to thinking — you know, that it”s the computers or something — holding the mouse all the time.” he looked at Miles. “Mate, you better get checked out, you know, the way you’re always drawing.” He waved the bottle at him.

Miles clutched his pencil tighter. “Look, about that money ...”

He could feel Paxton stop moving and stare at him. He kept drawing.

“Look mate, I told you I get it to you and I’m a man of my word. There’s just a few other things on my mind right now, right? Don’t push me right now. You'll get the money.” Miles heard the couch creak as the big man leant back. “Don't you worry about it.”

In 201 Lily Rhodes leant her yellow-gloved hands on the metal edge of the sink and closed her eyes.

“Don’t think I don’t know about you and that weirdo across the hall. I’ve been seeing you making eyes at him. I hear how people talk, you've been going over there haven't you?”

“Gary ... he's an artist ...”

“An artist? Fuck it, you’ve got no idea have you? The oldest one in the book and my wife falls for it. Tell me hall about how you𔄩ve got time for some fucking artist when you won’t even put out for your own husband, huh?”

“Gary ...” Her fingers gripped tighter. Lily stared at where dirty plates rose like shipwrecks on islands of foam. She focused on the patterns grease made on the top of the water until her husband’s voice blurred into the background.

“Are you listening to me bitch?”

She could remember a time when every night didn’t end like this. A time when she went to bed without pain behind her eyes, her hands aching, no fresh bruises on her arms. There was even a time, even further in the past, when she’d cared what this man said.

“I'll teach you to listen ...”

Now she felt nothing.

Her eyes refocused to below the layer of scum on the water, to where the knives lay crossed and waiting.

“What are you doing there Miles mate?”

Miles flinched a little at the Paxton leaning close over his shoulder. Quickly he closed the sketchpad.

“Nothing. So when are you going —”

The screaming began. From across the hall, a hoarse, horrible sound. A man’s voice, full of fear and horror bursting violently from down deep.

“Jesus —” said Paxton. He slammed the beer bottle on Miles’ sketchpad and ran for the door. Around them in the apartment block people stirred, doors opened, footsteps echoed.

In Apartment 201 Gary Rhodes screamed like a woman. That's how he would have described it — like a bloody woman. His let out a long high-pitched shriek as he watched his wife, standing at the sink, use a wide-bladed kitchen knife to methodically cut deep slices of flesh from her right arm. She made no sound and stayed turned from him as the blood spurted and flowed down the front of the cupboards. Lily put the knife carefully down and with her left arm took hold of the flesh at the end of her right thumb and began pulling down the line of the deep lateral cuts she had made right up to her elbow. Like a wedge pulled from an orange a slice of skin, muscle and sinew came away in her hand, exposing the bloody bone beneath.

In some part of his mind, behind the screams, Gary could hear hammering at his front door. The door was locked. By the time they got in it would be over.

Lily pulled away the last of the flesh from her arm and flexed the skeletal framework she’d exposed. The red and white digits played with the air, like individual sleepers awakening. Then suddenly they united in common purpose. She reached for the knife again and, faster and more confident now, began work on her left arm.

Her husband stopped screaming and began throwing up.

In his room Miles heard the doors opening and the people gathering. he carefully moved the beer bottle aside. he lifted the cover of his sketchbook and put pencil to paper. It was an anatomical study — the parts of the skeleton exquisitely detailed. The pelvis identified it as female.

As he finished sketching the radius and ulna of the right arm Miles thought about his next project. It was lucky Paxton had dropped in today. He’d almost forgotten what he looked like.