—so I says to her, don't touch the cord, whatever you do, and she looks at me like I've lost it. I hadn't even started the story yet. That's the thing about Priya, she wanted the explanation before she'd believe the warning.
Ray taps the beer mat against the table twice before he goes on, like he's counting something. He's been doing maintenance for the letting agency on Barrack Street since before I worked there, and everyone knows not to ask him about number 9 unless you've got twenty minutes and nowhere to be. He also collects those beer mats, has a shoebox of them at home, though he's never once mentioned what he does with them.
The house is a maisonette, he says. Narrow stairwell, no window on the landing, so there's a pull-cord for the light, one of the old Bakelite ones with the acorn on the end. Been there longer than the current fittings, he reckons, because nobody's ever bothered replacing it. Works fine.
The fella before Priya was called Wren. Aldous Wren, kept himself to himself, paid on time, no complaints from the neighbours except that his landing light burned all night, every night, which the electric board didn't love but wasn't their business. When they finally went in — six weeks after his last payment bounced — they found him up in the loft space, off the joist above the hatch. The cord round his neck was pale blue nylon washing line, nothing to do with the light switch. Ray says that part twice, slow, like he wants it written down somewhere.
Priya moved in that October. First week, ordinary. Second week, she noticed the pull-cord on the landing hanging maybe an inch lower than it should, close enough to brush the top of her head where before it hadn't. She measured it against the doorframe with a biro mark, the way you'd track a kid's height, more out of curiosity than anything. Three days later the mark was wrong. The cord had grown past it.
She told herself Bakelite cords stretch, cheap ones especially, and left it at that. But she started leaving the landing light on later each night, past the point she needed it, sitting up reading with the door open just so the glow reached her. On the nights she switched it off early, she slept badly and dreamed of climbing.
By November the cord reached her collarbone. She stopped mentioning it to anyone because the two people she did mention it to laughed, not unkindly, and said cords don't grow, love, you're just used to the flat now, you've stopped ducking.
On the ninth of December — Ray's sure of the date because it's his daughter's birthday, or near enough, he always gets the exact day wrong and has to correct himself — Priya didn't answer three calls in a row from her sister, who eventually let herself in with the spare key. The landing light was on. Priya was standing at the foot of the stairs, awake, both hands raised above her head, holding the cord away from her throat with the kind of grip you'd use on something trying to come down on its own.
Ray finishes his pint before he finishes the sentence. She wouldn't let go of it, he says. Not for the sister, not for the paramedics. They had to cut the cord to get her hands free, and even then her fingers stayed curled round nothing, the way they'd been for however many hours. Like she was still holding it up.
"Exit Frame: Red Stairwell and Warm Gallery Lighting at The Phillips Collection" by dalecruse is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.