Yesterday, upon the stair

Someone had been going through my things, re-arranging them. One night I returned home to find my briefcase floating in the kitchen sink. A flotilla of tax forms bobbed alongside. In the background the radio played ‘The Locomotion’, its tinny sound emerging from the airing cupboard. I collapsed into a nearby chair, my head spinning with confusion. Later I discovered my favourite armchair stuffed with knives.

The second time it happened, I came back to find the corridor through to the bathroom hung with old shoes and rashers of bacon. I managed to hurriedly take them all down, but the smell lingered for days, like a bitter memory.

At first I was mostly confused. How was this happening? What did it mean? There had been no messages pinned to the fridge or scrawled angrily across the walls.

I had other worries too. This intruder’s presence nagged at me. Even on days when nothing moved, I felt constantly on edge. The slightest sounds had me instantly alert. Whether lying in bed or busy with some domestic chore, I would perform an immediate search of the apartment, checking every room and hoping to catch them at work. For now, they escaped me.

In these few days my apartment felt like a changed place. Once a cosy space flushed with daylight, it had fallen under a terrible shadow. It was my home and had been for several years, yet now I felt that my ownership had been usurped. I was being pushed out by some intrusive presence, each one of these re-arrangements a challenge or protest against the order I had imposed on my possessions.

Concerned, I confided in Jonno over coffee at work.

‘Someone’s been in my flat moving things’ I said

‘Moving things?’

‘Yeah.’

He rubbed his chin.

‘They steal anything?’

‘No’

‘Weird’

‘I know’

‘Dead weird’

‘I know.’

There was a pause as he sucked on a finger.

‘You got a dog?’

‘Not allowed one’

‘Still got them knives?’

‘Confiscated’

‘Oh’

Another pause.

‘I spose if they’re not taking anything…maybe it can’t get any worse?’

He was wrong of course: soon things began to escalate. Now the intruder was making alterations at shorter and shorter notice. I only had to be gone a moment before something would have been moved. Once I disappeared downstairs to collect my laundry and returned a few minutes later to find a set of smashed up crockery dancing in the tumble dryer. Panicking, I rushed out into the hall, hoping to come across a stray footprint or some object dropped in haste. No sign could be found. I hammered on a few doors, trying to discover if my neighbours had heard anything. They were either unavailable or unable to answer my frantic questions. One suggested I calm down. Perhaps, she said, I was imagining things?

It wasn’t long before the situation grew worse. After a while I began to sense whole rooms shifting around in the night. Bored with simply disturbing my possessions, the intruder had raised his game. The first time it happened, I awoke to find that my sitting room had relocated overnight to the eastern end of the apartment, leaving in its place a series of cramped cupboards. I wasn’t sure how he’d pulled it off, but I was filled with disquieting resentment. While I remained trapped in a life over which I had little control, he seemed to delight in twisting its framework around me.

Later, I headed into the bathroom to use the loo, only to discover halfway through that I was standing on the balcony, aiming a stream of hot piss onto the street below. Unfortunately, this had only worsened the already fraying relations with my landlord and the other residents. Complaints were being made about my behaviour all the time now. Several neighbours had objected to my leaving the radio on at full volume throughout the day. Even when I explained this as an attempt to scare the intruder away, they were still less than pleased.

Now the other residents were starting to whisper when I passed them in the lobby. Maybe I was getting paranoid, but I was sure that I heard my name on their lips as they huddled close together. One time, in the lift up to my floor, I thought I heard Mr Banderjee laughing at me under his breath. Turning to leave, I drew up to him and looked him straight in the eyes.

‘You won’t find it so funny when he’s watching you in your sleep’ I whispered in his ear. Later that day, he reported me to the residents’ council for sexually threatening behaviour. I couldn’t see what was so sexy about it.

Within a few weeks the alterations began to escalate. Soon I found myself losing track of them. I could hardly even remember how the flat had looked when I first arrived. Yet now that the intruder was changing the shape and layout on an almost daily basis, I started to grow used to the situation. Like life during war time, it had become just another thing to reckon with. I simply got on with things. More accurately it had become almost a game, with new rounds apt to start afresh at a moment’s notice.

When I woke in the morning and got ready for work, I would often find myself without my wallet and keys. Remembering that I’d left them on the bedside table, I would reach out into unoccupied space and swiftly realise that the table and its contents had disappeared. The intruder especially liked to move those things I needed most. It seemed to amuse him. Unbothered, I would climb out of bed and, in the time it had taken me to pull on my slippers and dressing gown, the whole of my bedroom would have migrated further down the hall, in its place perhaps the bathroom, the tub overflowing with bubbling water. He liked to present me with a constant series of challenges, upping the ante at regular intervals so that I would have to overcome several difficulties each morning before even setting foot outside.

The intruder was nothing if not industrious. It seemed that each morning he worked faster and faster, changing the route around my every footstep. Sometimes I worried that I might one day become lost, trapped in an endlessly replicating hallway or sinking into a bathtub with no true bottom. For now he was content just to play.

By this point I had become so used to the changes that they began to slip into conversation, muddled in among my other thoughts.

One morning I bumped into Jonno leaving the men’s room.

‘That shaving foam behind your ear?’ he asked

‘Yes. I’ve been shaving.’

‘Here?’

‘Mmm’

‘At work?’

‘I would have done at home’ I said, ‘only the bathroom wasn’t where I left it.’

He pulled a face and scuttled off down the corridor.

In the supervisor’s office, it struck me that perhaps Jonno had not taken the situation as lightly as I did. The supervisor, a jowly man whose bald pate acquired the sheen of a bright red marble under light, gazed at me with fearful concern.

‘How are… things?’ he asked, his word bashing against tightly gritted teeth.

‘Yes’ I said, smiling.

‘Yes?’

‘They’re fine’

‘Things?’

‘Mm’

Neither of us seemed to be trying too hard. We both knew, I think, where the conversation was heading. We were simply going through the motions. I sat daydreaming while the Supervisor stood side-on at the window, gazing out across the business park and. He didn’t think I noticed, but every so often he looked anxiously in my direction, trying to read my expression like a coquettish schoolgirl scouting for drinks in a bar.

‘You see…’ he started, ‘I get the impression things are very much not fine’

‘No?’

‘Not at all. I rather think we’re losing you. Your attendance, for instance, is all over the place. Meetings missed, appointments forgotten. Sloppy.’

That last word shot from his mouth like a bullet.

‘Suppose so’ I said.

‘And then there’s all this talk of intruders.’

‘The intruder’

‘Regardless, it’s bothering the other staff and I don’t appreciate it. An unhappy office is an unproductive office, mm?’

‘Mm’ I agreed

‘I think now might be the time to leave without being pushed. Take a break. See how you feel in a week or two.’

The next few days passed in a blur. I was strung out and low. A peppering of stubble had collected around my chin and after the first week I abandoned washing entirely. It seemed a pointless formality. When the first of the morning sunlight broke through my window I found myself lounging in bed for hours, unable to think of a single reason to move. Most of my days were spent slumped on the sofa, dressed in an old t-shirt and dressing gown. I hadn’t left the apartment in days and now that my presence there was permanent, the intruder’s movements seemed to come and go in waves. As with everything else, I felt their effect only lightly. For now I was happy to rest, knowing things would soon pick up.

---------------

Only a few hours later, the tell-tale signs were beginning to collect. Objects flickered and moved at the edge of my sight. The television signal started to corrode, casting oblique patterns and flashing bands of colour across the faces of the two grinning presenters. I could feel something in the air growing tight and swirling about above my head. Somewhere in the near distance, the intruder was preparing another change. Soon this kinetic fugue would reach its climax; the seat would disappear from under me and I would lose my bearings once again. It was as if I had liberated some buried mental urge from the shadowy recesses of my brain, a deranged interior decorator with a knack for the menacing gesture. He wanted a playmate and, for the moment, I was dimly content to play along. I didn’t see that I had any other choice.

---------------

It was dusk and outside the traffic was building. A parade of motorcycles revved past, their exhaust fumes buffeting a clump of roadside weeds. A light scattering of rain petered out through the afternoon air. Looking up, I noticed the walls begin to slide loose and curl loose about the ceiling. I was suddenly aware of a dull hiss and instinctively pulled my eyes shut. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be allowed outside again.

---------------

By now most people had stopped calling. A few days ago the supervisor had rung, wondering whether I felt prepared to take up my position again. No pressure, he’d said. I hadn’t felt any. I had heard the plaintive rings resound throughout the apartment and hung on every word of the garbled answerphone message, but their meanings and allusions seemed divorced from my new reality. For a long time I had kept the phone receiver close by my side, hoping for contact from the outside world, wrapping it tightly in my pyjama sleeve. The intruder had whisked it away over night. By the time of the call it had been secreted somewhere beyond my reach.

He didn’t want me distracted.

Lately he had been toying with me, hiding the remote control immediately after cranking the volume of my television up to such astonishing levels that the window panes rattled in their frames. By now, I had given up all hope that he might reveal himself to me. Although he was invisible, I felt I knew his personality intuitively. His every action betrayed a childish, manipulative tendency. But he was not without moments of unexpected tenderness. The contents of my fridge had sometimes rained down on my shoulders and he was fond of switching on the radio when the loneliness of my situation began to wear.

In the past few days I had relinquished all responsibility. I had no more control over my life than a prisoner trapped behind bars. And yet, while I mapped and re-mapped my private world, I sometimes felt a blissful sense of release: with no say over the day’s events, I was free to enjoy the passing moments of calm as and when they arrived.

Now, my light peppering of stubble had become a thick beard. I had never had the time to grow one before and felt quietly proud of its progress. In my mind, I resembled the frontiersmen of the Old West, or one of the great Arctic explorers seen staring back from sepia memory.

Through necessity, I was eating less now. Catching my reflection one morning, I noticed the weight dropping away from me, the soft edges of my body pulled tight against my bones. My old self might have been shocked by this, but I felt sure the intruder would provide. With little to fill my time and increasing hunger pangs releasing waves of pleasurable chemicals across my brain, I found the days drifting by in pleasant reverie. With no way of marking their passing, I was un-tethered from time and constraint, lifted loose from the seamless binding of the minutes and hours.

---------------

He had been at work all day, mixing the rooms in a constant, driving whirl. Space flowed around me, colours merging and transforming before my eyes. Immediately I had settled, I found the atmosphere of my surroundings had evaporated, replaced with another. I saw those rooms I had known flash before me, presented at new, unexpected angles, distorted into impossible shapes. I was a long way from home. The life I had once claimed seemed buried aeons in the past. As the spiral whirred with ever increasing speed, I pressed myself deep into the plush sofa, feeling the world of things spinning away from me. I did not want to miss a single glaring moment. I did not want…I did not want…I did not want at all.