The Block

Mrs Hartigan opened the door.

On the landing, at the height of her hip, there were two children. Twins, about six, a boy and a girl, with the same black hair cut the same way and the same round brown eyes and the same expression of tremendous purpose. The boy was wearing one red wellington boot and one sock. The girl was holding the other red wellington boot in both hands in front of her, like a gift, or a weapon.

Behind them, three steps down the last flight, with one hand on the rail and the other over her eyes, a woman of about thirty-five in a cardigan, who had clearly run up a flight of stairs after two children and lost.

“Mrs Hartigan,” said the woman. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. They heard it on the radio. Their father had it on. And then Mrs Okonjo told me on the stairs that she’d seen him go out this morning with bags, and Stavros heard her, and…” She took her hand off her eyes. “I said we would ask first. I said.”

“You did say, Mrs Petrakis,” said Mrs Hartigan. “I heard you through the door.”

The twins were not looking at Mrs Hartigan. They were looking past her, round her, under her arm, into the room that was two rooms, at the table, where Frederick was sitting with a cold cup of coffee and his telephone in his hand and Inés’s message on it, and where Kate was sitting opposite with her eyes still red from the horseradish.

“Is that him?” said the girl, in a whisper that could have been heard on the first floor.

“That’s him,” said the boy, with total certainty, although he could not possibly have known.

---

Mrs Hartigan looked down at the twins. She looked at the boot. She looked over her shoulder at Frederick.

Then she stepped out onto the landing herself, in her socks, and pulled the door to behind her, not quite shut.

He could hear her through the inch.

“The landing,” said Mrs Hartigan, to the twins, and to their mother, and, Frederick suspected, to the stairwell in general, “is everybody’s. That’s the rule in this building and it’s always been the rule. It’s Mrs Okonjo’s and Mr Dabrowski’s and yours and ours and the man from the council’s. Anybody can be on the landing.” A pause. “Nobody comes in. That’s ours. That’s the rule of this flat. But if anybody wants to say good afternoon, they can say it on the landing. And he can come out and say it back.”

“Can we say it now?” said the boy.

“You can say it now.”

“Is he allowed out?”

“He’s allowed out,” said Mrs Hartigan. “He went to Dorsey’s.”

---

He went out onto the landing.

In his socks, because his shoes were by the door and Theo’s rule said shoes off at the door and did not say anything about putting them on again to stand on a landing, and the lino of the landing was cold through his socks, and the window at the end was grey with rain, and the spider plant was there, and the kitchen chair with the wobble, with nobody on it.

The twins looked up at him.

He was six feet one. They were about three and a half feet. It was a long way up. They looked up it with their mouths slightly open, the way Theo said people looked up at the Washington Monument, and then the girl, Eleni, held out the red wellington boot in both hands.

“This is Stavros’s,” she said.

He looked at it.

“He left it on the stairs,” said Eleni. “Yesterday. And this morning. And on Wednesday. Mummy says if he leaves it on the stairs one more time she’ll give it to the King.” She held it higher. “So I brought it.”

Behind her, three steps down, Mrs Petrakis put her hand back over her eyes.

He took the boot.

He held it. It was small and red and slightly muddy and had a picture of a frog on the side that had mostly worn off. He had stepped over it on Friday at a quarter past four, on the bottom stair of the last flight, on his way up.

“I stepped over this,” he said. “Yesterday. On my way up.”

Stavros looked at him with enormous eyes.

“Did you fall?”

“No.”

“Mr Dabrowski fell,” said Stavros. “On Tuesday. He said a word.”

“Stavros,” said his mother.

Frederick crouched down, so that he was the same height as the twins, more or less, and held the boot out to Stavros, and Stavros took it, and looked at it, and then at the King, and then, slowly, with the air of somebody performing a ceremony, sat down on the landing and put the boot on.

“There,” said Frederick. “Now it’s on.”

“On it is on it,” said Kate, from the door, and Mrs Hartigan made a sound in her throat.

---

Mrs Okonjo came up at a quarter to two.

She came up the last flight slowly, with one hand on the rail and a tray in the other, covered with a cloth, and she was small and round and about seventy, in a long patterned dress and a cardigan over it and a headwrap in the same pattern as the dress, and she did not hurry. She stopped on the top step and looked at the landing: at the twins, who were now sitting on the floor against the wall under the window with the spider plant, with all four boots on; at Mrs Petrakis, on the kitchen chair with the wobble, which Mrs Hartigan had given her; at Kate in the doorway; at Mrs Hartigan with her arms folded; and at Frederick, standing by the door in his socks.

“I knew it,” said Mrs Okonjo.

She said it the way she had looked it at Halloween, sixteen months ago, on the second floor, with the tray, when he had been in a wolf mask and a transit jacket and she had looked at him through the eyeholes a moment longer than she had looked at Theo, and had said nothing but young man.

“You knew it at Halloween,” said Frederick.

“I knew it at Halloween,” agreed Mrs Okonjo. “Theodore I knew from his ears. You I knew from the way you stood. In a wolf.” She looked at him. “I said nothing. It was not my business. A boy is a boy at Halloween.” She lifted the cloth from the tray. “Puff-puff. I made them when I heard the radio. They are for the family. Not for the King.” She looked at Mrs Hartigan. “Anneliese. For the family.”

Small round sweet fried things, golden brown, dusted with sugar, in paper cases, still warm. The same ones. Exactly the same ones, from Halloween, from the second floor, with the tray, that had been in his pocket in a paper napkin the whole of the next day.

Mrs Hartigan took the tray.

“For the family,” she said. “Thank you, Ngozi. They’ll be on the table at four.”

“On it is on it,” said Kate, and her mother said, without turning round, Katharina, in a voice that meant the joke was used up.

---

Mr Dabrowski came up at two.

He came up in the lift.

Everybody on the landing heard it: a grinding, a clank, a long pause, a second clank, and then the brown metal door with the window of wired glass in it sliding open on the fourth floor with the notice still taped to the glass, LIFT OUT OF ORDER, ENGINEER MONDAY, SORRY, D. (1st FLOOR), and Again in pencil, and out of it stepped a tall, thin, very old man in a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, with a walking stick in one hand and a clipboard in the other.

“It works,” said Mr Dabrowski, to the landing, before anybody could say anything. “It works for me. It doesn’t work for anybody else. I know how to talk to it. I wrote the notice so that nobody else would use it.” He looked at Frederick. “You’re the King.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dabrowski. First floor. I’ve lived in this building since 1979.” He held out the clipboard. “I have a petition.”

---

It was a petition about the lift.

It was three pages long, handwritten, in capitals, and it was addressed TO THE HOUSING DEPARTMENT OF THE COLUMBIA DISTRICT COUNCIL, and it set out, in eleven numbered paragraphs, the history of the lift in the building since 1979: the occasions on which it had stopped between floors (fourteen), the occasions on which the engineer had come on the day promised (two), the occasions on which a resident had been carried up or down the stairs in a chair because of it (five, including Mr Dabrowski himself in 2024, and a woman on the third floor with a broken leg, and a man on the second floor who had died, in 2019, the week after), and a request, in the last paragraph, for a new one.

It had forty-one signatures. Every flat in the building, and several from the building next door.

“I can’t sign it,” said Frederick.

Mr Dabrowski looked at him.

“I’m not allowed to sign petitions. I’m…” He tried to think how to say it. “Petitions are addressed to people who can decide. I’m not the council. And everything I sign, I sign because a minister’s told me to, and no minister’s told me to sign this.” He held the clipboard. “I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to.”

Mr Dabrowski considered this for some time, leaning on his stick.

“Then read it,” he said.

“Read it?”

“Read it,” said Mr Dabrowski. “The council doesn’t read it. I’ve sent it eleven times. Nobody reads it. You read it. All of it. Here.” He tapped the landing floor with his stick. “Then you’ve read it. Then somebody has.”

Frederick read it.

He read all of it, on the landing, standing in his socks, while the twins sat under the window eating puff-puff that Kate had brought out to them from the tray, against her mother’s ruling, and Mrs Petrakis watched from the chair with the wobble, and Mrs Okonjo leaned on the rail, and Mrs Hartigan stood in the doorway with her arms folded, and Mr Dabrowski stood very straight on his stick and watched him read it. He read the eleven paragraphs. He read the fourteen occasions and the two and the five. He read the paragraph about the man on the second floor in 2019. He read all forty-one names.

He read it twice, because it was the kind of thing you read twice.

Then he gave the clipboard back.

“It’s a very good petition,” he said.

“I know it’s a very good petition,” said Mr Dabrowski. “I’ve had fifty years to get it right.” He put the clipboard under his arm and looked at Frederick for a long moment, with his head on one side, the way old men look at a thing in a shop window they have decided not to buy and are glad they saw. “But now you’ve read it. That’s more than the council.”

And he got back in the lift, and pressed the button for the first floor, and the door slid shut on the notice, and there was a grinding, and a clank, and a long pause, and he was gone.

---

At half past two Mrs Hartigan sent two boys of about fourteen down the stairs.

They had come up from the street with their telephones held up in front of them, filming the stairwell as they climbed, talking to the telephones in the voices people used for talking to telephones, and they had got as far as the third landing, where the twins’ wellington boot had been, and Mrs Hartigan had gone to the rail of the fourth and looked down at them.

She did not say anything. She looked.

The boys stopped. One of them lowered his telephone. The other one did not, at first, and then did.

“Down,” said Mrs Hartigan.

They went down.

“Do you know them?” said Frederick.

“No,” said Mrs Hartigan. “But I’ve been a nurse for twenty-three years. I can look at anybody under twenty-five.” She came back from the rail. “And over twenty-five, I can look at most of them.”

---

His telephone buzzed in his pocket.

It was Castellanos, from the car at the corner.

Seven in at the street door since 13.15. Four out. Two boys, 14 or so, came out at 14.31 fast. Who are the other three still in?

He looked at the landing. At Mrs Petrakis on the chair with the wobble. At the twins under the window, sticky with sugar. At Mrs Okonjo on the rail.

He wrote back: Neighbours. Third floor, second floor. One went home in the lift.

The reply came in eleven seconds.

The lift works?

It works for Mr Dabrowski.

A pause of nearly a minute.

Understood, wrote Castellanos.

---

At ten to three, the door across the landing opened.

The other flat on the fourth floor, the one at the end by the window, whose door Frederick had passed forty-eight times and never once seen open. A man came out of it, in his shirtsleeves, about fifty, broad, with a moustache and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a set of car keys in his hand with a plastic fob on them that said DISTRICT CABS.

He looked at the landing for a moment, at all of them.

“Haddad,” he said, to Frederick, and nodded. “Across the way. I drive a cab. Nights. I’ve been asleep.” He did not seem surprised. He did not seem anything. “My wife says you’re the King.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Mr Haddad. “Then you won’t mind if I don’t stand around.” He looked past Frederick at Mrs Hartigan in the doorway. “Is Peter in?”

“He’ll be in at three,” said Mrs Hartigan. “He’s at the depot. Rotas.”

“I’ll wait,” said Mr Haddad, and leaned on the wall by his own door with his car keys in his hand, and waited, and said nothing else to anybody.

---

Mr Hartigan came up the stairs at three.

He came up the last flight in his bus driver’s jacket with the transit authority’s badge, with the newspaper under his arm, at the pace of a man who has climbed those fifty-six steps twice a day for three years and does not think about them, and he stopped on the top step and looked at his landing.

At the twins under the window. At Mrs Petrakis on a kitchen chair. At Mrs Okonjo on the rail. At his wife in the doorway with her arms folded, and his daughter beside her, and the King of fourteen realms in his socks by the door. At Mr Haddad, leaning on the wall by his own door with his car keys.

Mr Haddad pushed himself off the wall.

He crossed the landing to the top of the stairs, and held out his hand. Not to Frederick. To Mr Hartigan.

“Peter,” said Mr Haddad.

Mr Hartigan looked at the hand. Then he shook it.

“I’ve wanted to do that since 2027,” said Mr Haddad. “Since the reporter at the depot. Since the money.” He did not let go at once. “I’ve driven a cab in this city for twenty-two years. I know what it is, saying no to money like that, on what they pay you.” He let go. “That’s all. I wanted to do it. My wife said I’d never do it unless there was a reason to be on the landing, and now there’s a reason.” He nodded at Frederick, once, without much interest. “So.”

He went back across the landing and into his own flat and shut the door.

---

Mr Hartigan stood at the top of the stairs for a moment.

Then he came along the landing, past the twins, who looked up at him, and past Mrs Okonjo, who said Peter and patted his arm, and past Mrs Petrakis, who stood up off the chair with the wobble and sat down again, and stopped in front of Frederick in his socks by the door.

He looked at him. The long steady look. The bus driver’s look.

“Seven people on my landing,” said Mr Hartigan, “on a Saturday.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He went past him to the door and stopped there, with his hand on it, and looked back at the landing, at all of them, at his neighbours, who had lived on these stairs beside him for three years and stopped noticing within about six weeks, and had now, on a Saturday in February, because of the radio and a nine-pack of toilet paper, noticed again.

“It’s the first time,” said Mr Hartigan, “anybody’s been on it at all.”

He went in.

Kate, in the doorway, held up six fingers to Frederick, and then, after a moment’s thought, a seventh.