Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

He must hedge his bets. He'd call the health club this morning and ask about joining. Suppose he found out who her guru was, or her clairvoyant or whatever? That would be easier than a party. He knew she had one. It had been in the papers. He wouldn't have to be invited to a guru's place. He could just go, provided he paid. There were ways of finding out when Nerissa's appointments were and then somehow he would get his to precede or follow hers. It wouldn't be all pretending either, it wouldn't just be a ploy. He wouldn't mind seeing someone who knew about the supernatural. If there really were ghosts and spirits and whatever or if sighting them was always in the mind. A guru or a medium could tell him.

Mix finished his tea, closed the scrapbook, and forced himself to walk over to the long mirror that was a cheval-glass framed in stainless steel. He shut his eyes and opened them again. There-nothing and no one behind him, what a mad idea! Naked, he confessed to himself that there was room for improvement. In his job and with his ambition, he ought to have a perfect figure, a six-pack belly, fleshless hips, and a small hard bum. Once it had been like that-and would be again, here solved. All those chips and chocolate bars were to blame. His face was all right. Handsome, according to Colette and others, the features regular, the eyes a steady honest blue. He could tell they admired his fine head of light brown hair with the blond highlights, but his skin ought not to be so pale. She would be used to men of perfect physique and magnificent tan. The gym was the answer to that, and the tanning place round the corner. He couldn't see his back, but he knew the scars were all gone now, anyway. Pity, really. He still nursed a fantasy that had begun when his back was still bleeding, of showing someone-the police, the social services-what Javy had done and seeing him handcuffed and taken away to prison. It was either that or killing him.

For five years Mix had been his mother's darling. He was her only child, his father a boyfriend who had moved out when he was six months old. She was only eighteen and she loved her little son passionately. But not enduringly or exclusively, for when Mix was five she met James Victor Calthorne, fell for a baby and married him. Javy, as everyone called him, was big and dark and handsome. At first he took very little notice of Mix except to smack him and at first it seemed to the boy that his mother loved him as much as ever. Then the baby was born, a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl they called Shannon. Mix couldn't remember feeling much about the baby or seeing his mother pay her more attention than she paid him, but the psychiatrist they made him go to when he was older told him that was his trouble. He resented his mother withdrawing her love from him and transferring it to Shannon. That was why he tried to kill-thebaby.

Mix remembered nothing about it, nothing about picking up the tomato ketchup bottle and hitting her with it. Or not quite hitting her. Bashing inside the cot but missing. He couldn't remember Javy coming into the room, but he remembered the 'beating Javy gave him. And his mother standing there and watching but doing nothing to stop him. He had used the leather belt, from his jeans, pulling Mix's T-shirt over his head, lashing at his back till it bled.

That never happened again, though Javy went on smacking him whenever he didn't toe the line. Apart from the psychiatrist talking about it, the only way he knew he had tried to kill Shannon was because Javy was always telling him. He got on quite well with his little sister and with the babyboy, Terry, who was born a year later, but if ever Javy caught him even disagreeing with Shannon or taking a toy awayf rom her, he'd repeat that story and say how Mix had tried tokill her.

"You'd be dead by now," he'd say to his daughter, "but for me stopping that murdering kid." And to his little son, "You want to watch him, he'll kill you as soon as look at you."

That would be a way to get famous, Mix sometimes thought, killing one's stepfather out of revenge. But Javy had left them when he was fourteen. Mix's mother wept and sobbed and had hysterics until Mix got fed up with it and slapped her face.

"I'll give you something to make you cry," he had shouted in his anger. "Standing there and watching him beat me up."

They sent him to the psychiatrist for hitting his mother. A domestic violence perpetrator waiting to happen-that was the description he overheard one social worker call him. She was still alive, his mother, not yet fifty, but he'd never see her again.

It was Saturday, so he could park more or less anywhere he could find a space in Westbourne Park Road. As it happened he got on to the same eter as Nerissa had used. Mix was besotted enough to get a thrill out of that, just as he would have from touching something she had touched or reading somesign she had read hours before. He went up to the door and rang the lowest one of a series of bells. The door growled open on to an unprepossessing hallway smelling of incense, a steep and narrow staircase, and a smart new lift, all steel and glasslike his mirror. It took him up a couple of floors where, to Mix's relief, everything was like itself, streamlined, glittering, and sleek. Doors opened off the hallway, labeled Reflexology and Massage and Podiatry. The gym was full of young people laboring away on treadmills and skiers and stationary bikes. Through a big picture window he could see girls in bikinis and men looking the way he wanted to look, either in or sitting round the edge of a large bubbling Jacuzzi. A thin dark girl in a leotard with an open white coat over it asked him what h ewanted. Mix had had an idea. He explained his trade and asked if anyone was needed to service and maintain the machines.

His company would consider taking Shoshana's on.

"It's funny you should say that," said the girl, "because the guy who was going to do ours let us down yesterday."

"I think we could fit you in," said Mix. He asked what rates the defaulters had charged. The answer pleased him. He could undercut that. And he began to think daringly of taking it on privately, strictly against the company's rules, but why should they find out?

"I'll have to ask Madam Shoshana." She had a falteringvoice and the bright nervous eyes of a mouse. "Would you like to give me a call later?"

"I'll do that small thing. What's your name then?"

"Danila. "

"That's a funny one," he said.

She looked about sixteen. "I'm from Bosnia. But I've been here since I was a kid."

"Bosnia, right." There had been a war there, he thought vaguely, back some time in the nineties.

"I was afraid for a moment you wanted to join," said Danila.

"We got a waiting list as long as your arm. Most of them don't come more than four times-that's the usual, four times-but they're on the books, aren't they? They're members."

Mix was interested in only one member. "I'll call you later," he said.

Suppose Nerissa was here now? He wandered along the aisle between the machines. Small television transmitters hung at head height in front of each one and all were showing either a quiz show or a very old Tom and Jerry cartoon. Most were watching the cartoon while pumping or pedaling away. She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look closely. She stoodout from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer. Those long legs, that gazelle's body, that raven hair must cause a sensation in here.

Contemplating going to a film, later a drink with Ed in the Kensington Park Hotel, the pub Reggie had used and called KPH, he thought of the figure he had hallucinated on the stairs. Suppose it wasn't a hallucination but a real ghost? Suppose it had been Reggie? His ghost, that is. His spirit, doomed to haunt the environs of where he’d once lived. Mix knew Reggie didn't really look like Richard Attenborough; or like himself, come to that. He'd looked quite different, taller and thinner and older. There were plenty of photographs in his books. Mix became very frightened when he tried to conjure up an image of the man on the stairs. Besides, he couldn't do it. He just about knew it was a man and not very young and maybe wearing glasses. Yes, he couldn't have made up the glasses, could he? They couldn't have been in his mind.