‌The Spiral Staircase

A true story

‌Jay Griffiths

It happened in Bristol, during the Blitz. Every night, Len drove an ambulance to collect the dead and the injured. He would be given a slip of paper with a typed address, a message sending him across the city to houses bombed with explosives or incendiary devices. His job was to find whatever remained.

One night, having done several journeys through the siren-scarred night, he returned to base and went to the control room. The controller was a slow, careful woman. He held out his hand impatiently for the next message slip with the next address on it. The address he was given was his own.

■

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. He had often read this story to his daughter at bedtime. He couldn’t get the line out of his head now.

‘Does the sky ever fall in real life?’ she had asked.

‘Never, my little princess, never.’

He had stroked her silky hand. She put all her small fist in his and her trust made him a lion, he carried her up the cast-iron spiral staircase to her bedroom, with a window to the stars.

■

Now he holds the message slip in his hand. Motionless, he stares at the controller. She doesn’t know that where a stranger’s address should be, he sees his own. He is seized by an agony of heroism which turns his mouth to metal in a moment. He says nothing but takes the paper and walks to the ambulance. His knees don’t shake but they don’t bend either.

Anti-aircraft lights are scoring his deep, dark veins and all his lovely inner night is torn open.

All sounds recede. The fall of information on deafened ears. The typed letters indent the paper like the beloved marks of baby teeth on the books in his study.

Then panic. The siren, screaming itself white in the black night, is screaming inside his silence.

Dry-mouthed, he wants to take the message back to the controller and tell her she’s an idiot, that she made a stupid mistake. Then he wants to rip up the message, tear it to shreds, burn it and stamp on the ashes. But even if he does, the message won’t go away. The writing is on the wall. A written warning. It is written, it is written, it is written.

Suddenly, the paper seems alive to him and he clutches at it, fearing to drop it. He twists the paper between two fingers as he pushes his round glasses up over his nose and grasps the wheel. Why am I holding onto it? Am I likely to forget, for God’s sake – and his mind swings with his hands on the wheel turning the corner as fast as he can – am I likely to forget what it says? It is my most precious memento. All I will have left of my world is the little scrap of paper which denotes it.

He grips it for dear life. The message is now an icon, the print of an address burnt onto his mind like the print of a dress which will be burnt onto the body of a small girl in Hiroshima. The future is in the present. East is West and the girl is his own daughter. Lateral explosions. Collateral damage. East of the sun and West of the moon, he hums, madly. ‘Love… makes one little room an everywhere’, and his whole world is in that address.

I am the only one who knows what this message means. And what it means is that I am alone in a world deworlded. He can read the message forwards and backwards, from the present into the future and from the future into the past. This is the message of infinite destruction and he will carry the message wherever he must.

Driving across Bristol, he is driving from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Tension fuses his hands onto the steering wheel as the skies, prised apart from the heavens, crash to earth.

The sky is falling now. On all my world.

Of all the houses in all of Bristol, you had to drop bombs on mine. That house was my whole world, you bastards. You bastards, you bombed my whole, entire world.

His round-toed shoes gun the accelerator, when suddenly a tabby cat runs into the low headlights and he slams on the brakes. Damn it to hell, must this war take everything? Even a little pussy cat?

He is there. He is there. He is there.

Part of the roof is on fire.

The house is still standing.

Hope corkscrews through him, hurting him.

He pulls open the door and then he sees.

His whole world is trembling in the balance.

All the glad world held to ransom in that moment.

Hanging by a thread.

For an incendiary bomb has fallen on the house but – by all the angels who ever loved me – he gasps, the bomb has fallen in the dead centre of the cast-iron stairwell.

There it burns. Caught, burning its fury, exquisitely, caught in the nick of time, in the nick of place. Tucked in the spiral banisters, the bomb rocks and fizzes.

Underneath it, deep in the cellar, dark and implicit as a womb, his wife and children are tucked together: his world and worlds to come. The children are whimpering: he sees his daughter first, her eyes full of fear and fireworks, transfixed by the bomb. It is seared onto her retina and I know that for the rest of her life she will never understand how people can actually like fireworks.

‘Dad is here, Dad is here, Dad is here,’ her brother shouts out, breaking the spell, and she sees him as never before. Hero. Mountain. Tree. Lion. Dad.

His wife is calculating if it is safe to edge out of the cellar now. The children don’t think: they run to their father, he lifts them to kiss them, but they are not kissable children now, they are small, frightened animals, and they burrow into his body, tucking themselves into the deep dark of his overcoat.

‘You’ll be right as ninepence, my darlings, right as a trivet, right as rain, right as…’ and his voice was too choked to go on.

■

‘The sky did fall, Dad. Might it ever fall again?’

‘Never, my little princess, never.’

It was months later. He was taking his little daughter up the stairs to her bedroom with a window to the stars. Memory turns in spirals, like a staircase, like the double helix of DNA, like whorls of galaxies. As he carried her, he remembered not only her near-death but also her conception.

His wife was looking sternly at him, telling him he was a bit tipsy. So he tickled her. And tickled her again till she giggled. I imagine them giggling when a little spurt of starlight shot out of him, giggling seeds which laughed their way into her earth-night and one shooting star, with perfect aim, found its way right into the centre of her whorls and inner spiral stairwells, exploding on the scene, a tiny bomb of life: sherbet, yeast, champagne, fireworks, star-works. Ping! My mother.