Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Fever Beat”
Nine days.
Not that he was counting. Counting would imply a tally, and a tally would imply significance, and there was no significance here, none whatsoever, this was simply a period of time that had elapsed in the ordinary way that time does, the way it had elapsed before the blackout and would continue long after everyone involved had entirely forgotten about it. Which they had. Obviously. Elliot certainly had.
It was, however, nine.
He knew it was nine because the blackout had been Thursday, and this was Saturday of the following week, and if you laid that out on a calendar, which he hadn’t done, but if you did, you got nine. Nine days. Two hundred and sixteen hours, if you were the sort of person who converted things, which he was, professionally, and which meant nothing.
He looked back at his screen.
Pellicorp Holdings / Pellicorp Logistics - Intercompany Reconciliation - Q3.
He’d been looking at it for fifty-one minutes.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. Reconciliations were slow work. That was the nature of them, you crawled through a ledger line by line like a man going over a field with a metal detector. What was remarkable, what was, if Elliot were being honest, which he was strenuously avoiding, was that he had crawled over this particular field eleven times now and had found nothing, and that on the last three passes he’d made errors. Actual errors. Yesterday he'd transposed a four and a one, twice, in the same column, which was the kind of thing you did at twenty-two on your first month in the job and then never did again because your ears burned so badly the first time.
He was, at this precise moment, staring at a figure he’d already checked. He knew he’d already checked it. He had a system, a little grey tick he put beside each verified line, and there was the tick, sitting there, mocking him.
He checked it again.
Four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds. Still missing. Still hiding somewhere in eleven thousand lines of intercompany traffic, sitting quietly in the dark, waiting for someone competent to come and find it.
"Right," Elliot said, out loud, to nobody. The fourteenth floor at ten past nine on a Saturday morning was empty in a different way to how it was at ten at night, a bright, harmless, weekend sort of empty, sunlight coming in flat and yellow across forty vacant desks, the aircon doing its Saturday setting. He had come in voluntarily. Again. Because the work had got behind. Which it had.
He scrolled back to the top of the ledger and started again.
He got four lines down before his brain, entirely without permission, produced the smell of clean sweat and cheap detergent and something underneath it that was cedar or tobacco or neither.
Elliot put both hands flat on the desk.
No, he told himself. ‘We're not doing that. We're not doing it now, and we're not doing it at eleven o'clock tonight, and we're definitely not doing it in the shower, which was a low point, frankly.’
Because the astonishing thing, the actually enraging thing, the thing that made him want to go and lie down in the loading bay, was that the memory wouldn’t degrade.
He had a good memory in general and a poor memory for exactly this sort of thing. He had never been able to remember faces. He couldn't recall what his own grandmother's kitchen smelled like, and he'd spent a decade of Sundays in it. He had lost, over the years, almost everything sensory about Marcus except the sound of a coat being taken off a hook. Memory was supposed to fade. It was one of its few redeeming features.
This one hadn't faded by a single degree in nine days.
He could summon it instantly and in full: the specific composition of another man's breath at six inches, warm and slightly sweet, cold coffee and something almost mineral under it, and the way his entire brain had simply stopped and stood there like a crowd watching a building come down. He could do it standing at the photocopier. He could do it on the Tube. He had done it, appallingly, in the middle of Marjorie's Tuesday variance meeting and had had to be asked a question twice.
‘You did this to yourself’, he thought bitterly. ‘You memorized it on purpose. You're an idiot with a filing system’.
He typed a number into the working sheet.
He looked at it.
It was the wrong number.
At half eleven he gave up and went for coffee, which meant the stairs.
The stairs had been, initially, a temporary measure. That was important. On the Friday morning after, when he had gone home at five a.m. and lain on top of his duvet in his work clothes staring at the ceiling until his alarm went off, and then come back in, he had simply not fancied the lift. Which was reasonable. Which was, in fact, a documented psychological response. He’d been trapped in one for five and a half hours. There were probably leaflets.
That was Friday. This was the Saturday of the following week, and the temporary measure had acquired an infrastructure.
He had the timings now. Fourteen floors down, at a good clip, in work shoes, taking the half-landings in twos where the tread allowed: four minutes forty. Fourteen floors up: seven and a half, and you arrived visibly damp, which was why he'd started keeping deodorant in his desk drawer, which was normal and hygienic and something many people did. The stairwell exited into the loading bay at the back of the building, which came out on the side street, which meant that to get to the coffee place he now walked the long way around the entire block rather than the fifteen meters across the lobby.
He had done the math on this too, because he couldn’t help himself. Over nine days, the extra walking came to roughly eleven miles.
Eleven miles. To avoid a lobby.
"It's cardio," he had told Priya, on the phone, on Tuesday.
"You've never done cardio in your life. You once got a taxi to a gym."
"That was a seasonal…it was raining."
"Elliot."
"It's also the step-count thing. On the watch. I'm competing with Callum."
"You hate Callum."
"That's what makes it compelling."
Anyway. It was cardio, and it was the step count, and it was also, this was the strongest argument, the one he deployed when the others failed, the entirely rational position of someone whose lift had catastrophically broken with him inside it. He had lived experience. They hadn't even had an engineer out for four days. He'd checked. He'd asked facilities, casually, in a way that had probably not been casual at all, and Deepa in facilities had said someone had put a job in on the Thursday night and the engineers had signed it off as no fault found, which had made something turn over in his chest for reasons he had declined to look at.
‘It wants going over. Something in it's been running hot for months, and nobody's noticed till tonight.’
Elliot took the stairs two at a time.
The service stairwell was the ugliest part of Pellicorp Tower by an enormous margin, and he’d developed a strange affection for it. Bare concrete, painted breezeblock, a handrail of cold galvanized steel, one fluorescent strip per landing, and the floor number stenciled on the wall in yard-high grey figures. Nobody used it. In nine days he had encountered exactly two other human beings in it, both cleaners, both of whom had looked at him with mild concern.
He went down through fourteen, thirteen, twelve, his footsteps clanging back at him off the concrete, and he didn’t think about anything at all, and this was becoming genuinely quite good exercise.
The near-miss happened at twelve.
Not floor twelve. Twelve o'clock, on his way back in, coffee in hand, wet through the shoulders because it’d started raining somewhere around the far side of the block, which was the side that he now walked around.
The loading bay door needed a fob. He fobbed it, shouldered it open, and came into the back corridor, service lifts, bin store, a trolley of blue roll, and made for the stairwell door.
And through the wire-glass window of the fire door that led to the lobby, at the exact wrong moment, he saw him.
Just the back. Just a slice of it, framed in a square of reinforced glass, the diamonds of wire dividing him up: the width of the shoulders in the too-small uniform, the dark head, one forearm braced on the reception desk as he leaned over to say something to Gav-with-the-moustache from days. A day shift. He never did days. He was on nights, that was the entire arrangement, that was the whole architecture of the man's life, he'd explained it at half past midnight in a hot box with his forearms across his knees, so what was he doing here, on a Saturday, at noon, in the daylight, standing in the lobby.
Elliot flattened himself against the breezeblock wall.
He did it fast, and hard, and entirely without conscious instruction, the way you'd flinch from a wasp, and the coffee slopped up through the little hole in the lid and scalded the back of his hand and he didn’t make a sound.
He stood there.
He was pressed against a wall in a service corridor, next to a trolley of blue roll, holding a burning coffee, hiding from a man he hadn’t spoken to in nine days.
‘This is fine’, he thought. ‘This is a normal way to conduct oneself’.
He counted to ninety, which took a very long time, and during which he learned a number of things about the ceiling. Then he leaned forward by degrees and looked through the wire-glass again and the lobby was empty except for Gav, who was eating a sandwich.
Elliot let out a long breath and stood there in the corridor feeling the exact composition of his own feelings, which were, in order: relief, and then, arriving about a second later, uninvited, and considerably larger, a disappointment so sharp and so childish that it actually made his eyes sting.
"Oh, get a grip," he said out loud, to the blue roll.
He went up the stairs. All fourteen. It took seven minutes and fifty seconds, which was slow, because his legs were tired, because he had walked eleven unnecessary miles that week.
He got back to his desk at ten past twelve and sat down and looked at the reconciliation.
The thing about the missing four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds was that it was, objectively, one of the least important things in the building. Nobody would ever notice it. It would net off against something eventually or sit in a suspense account until the systems migration in the spring, and no shareholder, no auditor, no human being anywhere on earth would be one penny better or worse off for Elliot Reyes finding it.
He had known this on the Tuesday he'd volunteered for it. He'd known it at ten at night on the fourteenth floor. That had never been the point.
The point was that he was good at it. That when he sat down in front of eleven thousand lines of ledger, the noise went off, all of it, the whole clattering apparatus, the timing and the material and the fence, and there was just the work, and the work was solvable, and he was very quietly the best at it of anyone on this floor. It was the one place in his life where he didn't have to be funny to be worth having in the room.
And now he couldn't do it.
He'd sat here for four hours on a Saturday and got nothing but a wrong number and a grey tick beside a line he'd already checked, because some part of his brain had been requisitioned nine days ago and hadn’t been returned, and was currently occupied full-time with the smell of another man's breath.
‘You're not even sad’, he thought, with some wonder. ‘You're just…off. Like the whole instrument's been knocked out of tune by one degree and nothing sounds right and you can't find the peg’.
He picked up his phone. There was a message from Priya from an hour ago:
Priya: are you AT WORK. it's SATURDAY
Priya: tonight. mine. 8pm. NOT NEGOTIABLE. we've given you nine days of grace and the grace period is OVER elliot
Priya: we want the whole thing. every detail. sef has drawn a diagram
Elliot looked at that for a while.
Elliot: there's no diagram-worthy content. it was a lift. we sat in it.
Priya: SIX HOURS
Elliot: five and a half
Priya: OH so we're precise about it are we. we're keeping EXACT RECORDS are we
Elliot: I'm an accountant Priya it's a personality disorder with a payroll number
Priya: 8pm. bring wine and the truth
He put the phone face-down on the desk. Then he picked it up and put it face-up. Then he put it in the drawer, which was where it belonged, which was where he kept it when he was working properly, back when he’d been a person who worked properly.
He looked at the ledger.
Eleven thousand lines. Somewhere in there, four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds, sitting quietly, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be found by somebody who was paying attention.
"Yeah," said Elliot Reyes, to the screen. "Well. Join the club."
*
The others arrived at two, because there was a board pack going up on Monday and Marjorie had sent a Thursday email containing the phrase ‘I'm sure I don't need to spell out how this reflects on the team’, which in Pellicorp dialect meant a Saturday.
They came in the way people come in on a weekend: too loud, dressed wrong, treating the office like a place they were burgling. Nadia first, red glasses shoved up in her hair, carrying an entire tray of coffees she had bought without asking anyone. Then Callum, on the phone, mouthing ‘sorry, sorry, two minutes’ to the room while conducting what was clearly a domestic negotiation of some complexity. Then Big Rob, who didn’t walk into rooms so much as arrive in them, and who had brought a family-sized bag of Percy Pigs for eleven people who weren’t there.
"Oh, he's already in," said Nadia, dumping the tray. "Of course he's already in. Since when?"
"Nine."
"Nine on a Saturday."
"Some of us have standards, Nadia."
"Some of us have lives, Elliot." She handed him a flat white without being asked, correctly, because she’d been handing him the correct coffee for two years. "Right. What's left."
What was left was the variance pack: forty-one pages of commentary explaining why the numbers had done what the numbers had done, which Marjorie would then read aloud at the board on Monday in a voice that suggested she'd written it herself. They divided it up. They started work. Within eleven minutes they had stopped working entirely and had begun the real business of the Saturday shift, which was talking.
It was, Elliot thought, because he was in a strange mood and had been for nine days, genuinely one of the good ones. This floor. This lot. He had worked in three offices before this and two of them had been the kind where people ate lunch at their desks with headphones on, and this one wasn't, and that was mostly luck but it was partly Nadia and partly Rob and it was, if he was honest, partly him.
"Right, the card," said Nadia, pulling out an envelope. "Sign the card."
"Whose is it?"
"Sunil's."
"Who's Sunil?"
"That's the thing," said Nadia, "nobody knows. It's been going round for two weeks. There's forty-one signatures on it."
Big Rob took it and read it with great seriousness. "There's people on here who've left. Look…that's Priti. Priti went to Deloitte in March."
"So Priti's signed a card for a man she's never met, from a company she doesn't work for."
"She's written ALL THE BEST FROM THE OLD GANG."
"Give it here." Elliot took it, uncapped a pen, and wrote ‘Sunil, you know what you did. E.R.’ and passed it on, and Big Rob made a noise like a boiler and Callum, still on the phone, put a hand over the mouthpiece to say ‘what's he written, what did he write’, and Elliot, in the middle of it, at the exact moment the laugh landed, looked away.
At the window. At the sunlight on the empty desks. At absolutely anything else.
He caught himself doing it in real time, which was new, and appalling, and entirely Theo Marchetti's fault.
‘You do a thing. When they laugh. You look away.’
Nine days ago that’d been a piece of information. Now it was a splinter. He couldn’t stop noticing it. It’d happened four times already this morning and each time some cold little observer at the back of his skull had gone ‘there it is again’, and the pleasure of the laugh, which had never been a small pleasure, which had frankly been the load-bearing pleasure of his adult life, had gone thin and complicated, like a song you've been told has a sample in it.
"Anyway," Nadia was saying, "we're not doing the fridge again. I refuse."
"The fridge is the biggest story in this building," said Big Rob.
"It is not the biggest story in this building." She turned. "Elliot's the biggest story in this building."
And there it was.
It’d been coming all week. It’d been coming since the Friday, when he'd walked in at nine a.m. on four hours of no sleep and Callum had said ‘mate, you look rough’ and Nadia had said ‘why does he look rough’ and someone from facilities had said the thing about the lift, and the whole floor had turned round.
"Do not," said Elliot.
"The ordeal," said Big Rob, with relish.
"It was not an ordeal."
"Six hours."
"Five and a half…"
"He's precise about it," said Nadia, delighted, "every single time anyone says six he says five and a half…"
"Because it was five and a half, and I'm not going to let this building's oral tradition inflate it into some kind of…of Shackleton thing…"
"Were you scared?" said Callum, off the phone at last, dropping into a chair. "Genuinely. Because I'd have been out of my mind. I'd have been clawing at the doors."
And Elliot opened his mouth.
And the bit came out.
It came out fully formed, the way things did, it’d been assembling itself somewhere below the waterline for nine days and it was good, that was the horrible thing, it was tight and clean and it had a shape. He did the lift stopping. He did the six-inch gap and the torch beam. He did his own internal monologue of someone realizing he was going to have to be in a confined space with a colleague for the entire night, with the specific comic horror of it, the small talk, the nowhere to look. He did the heat. He did, and this got the biggest laugh, the security guard's total imperturbability, the flat one-word answers, the man who had apparently attended a training course for this and who’d responded to the collapse of the national grid with the enthusiasm of someone finding out the shop had run out of a particular sandwich.
"He said, and I quote, ‘sit still, don't panic. Panicking makes you hot’."
Nadia had her head on the desk. Big Rob was making the boiler noise. Callum said, "Panicking makes you hot’, that's going on my gravestone…"
"That's what I said, I said, so does being at thirty-six degrees, mate…"
They lost it. All three of them, properly, the good kind, the kind that made the empty floor ring.
And Elliot stood in the middle of it, holding a flat white, looking at the window.
It was, he thought, a very strong five minutes. It was probably the best five minutes he'd done all year. And it was, and he knew this with a precision that made his stomach drop a floor, a lie. Not in the details. Every detail in it was true. It was a lie in the way a photograph of half a room is a lie: because the man in it wasn't the man. Because he'd taken Theo Marchetti, who had said ‘worst is Sunday nights, because everyone else has had a Sunday’, and who had folded a shirt with hands too big for the job and handed it over rather than say sorry, and who had told him about a woman in a dressing gown holding a bottle of Calpol at two in the morning, and had turned him into a bit. A slab. A stone-faced comic prop with one-word answers, for the entertainment of three people on a Saturday afternoon.
He'd made the decision at twenty past four in the morning, six inches from another man's mouth, and it had lasted nine days, and he’d just broken it for a laugh from Big Rob.
"You all right?" said Nadia.
"Yeah," said Elliot. "Bit tired. Weekend."
"You want to knock it on the head. Go home."
"Yeah," he said. "Maybe."
He went and stood in the print room for four minutes for no reason at all.
*
Priya's flat was on the second floor of a converted terrace in Peckham and smelled, permanently and inexplicably, of oranges. By ten past eight there was wine open, a lasagna in a state of unfinished business, and three people arranged around a low table with the alert posture of a select committee.
"So," said Priya.
"So," said Elliot.
"Six hours."
"Five and a…"
"HE'S DOING IT," said Sef, pointing. "You said he'd do it. You said he'd do the precise thing."
"I said he'd do the precise thing," Priya agreed, "and Dominic said I was being unkind."
Dom, from the armchair, not looking up from the wine label: "You were being unkind. You were also right. Both things."
"Right." Priya put her glass down and laced her fingers. "Ground rules. You don't get to do the routine. We've heard it. Sef's already heard it because Callum's girlfriend put it on the group chat…"
"Callum's girlfriend put it where?"
"…so we know about ‘panicking makes you hot’, we know about the wetsuit man, we've had the version with the jokes in. What we want," and here she leaned forward, and every trace of the comedy went out of her voice, and Elliot remembered abruptly that Priya Raval had been the person who held his head over a sink for two hours the night Marcus left and had never once mentioned it again, "is the other version."
There was a small silence.
"There isn't another version," said Elliot.
"Elliot."
"There genuinely…look. It was a lift. It broke. There was a man in it. We were in it for five and a half hours and then it un-broke and I went to work. That's the whole…"
"What's he look like," said Sef.
"What?"
"The guard. What's he look like." Sef refilled Elliot's glass to a criminal level. "We've been speculating for nine days and I want to know how close I got. I've said tall."
"He's tall."
"HOW tall?"
"Six four."
Sef sat back. "And you know that because…"
"Because he said, Sef, because people say their height, it's a thing people say…"
"Build," said Priya.
"I don't know. Big."
"Big how? Big like Big Rob or big like…"
"Not like Big Rob." It came out faster than he meant. "He's not…he does something, or he used to, rugby, I think, he's…" Elliot became aware that all three of them had gone extremely still, in the manner of people at a bird hide. "He's built, all right, he's built like a…he's just…he takes up a lot of room, it's genuinely a spatial issue…"
"Oh my God," said Sef.
"Hands," said Priya.
"I'm not answering that."
"That's an answer."
"That is not…"
"That's an answer," said Dom, mildly, to the wine label.
And Elliot laughed, and it was fine, it was fine, this was the shape of the evening he’d prepared for, this he could do, he could do this for hours, the arch withholding, the eyebrow, giving them enough shape that they'd feel fed and never once getting near the middle of it.
So he did that. For about forty minutes he did it, brilliantly. He gave them the heat and the torch and the two-thirds of the floor and the shirt, the fact of the shirt, the comic outrage of the shirt, delivered as farce: ‘and then he says, mate, do you mind if I take my shirt off, like he's asking to open a window’, and they screamed, and Sef had to put his glass down, and Priya said "and what did you say" and Elliot said "I said no, it's fine, in the voice of a man being read his rights" and they screamed again.
He didn’t tell them that Theo had apologized first. He didn’t tell them that the man had been embarrassed, or that he'd got stuck in the sleeve, or that the whole devastating force of it had come from the fact that he had absolutely no idea what he looked like.
He didn’t tell them about ‘told someone I was happy, for about nine years’.
He didn’t tell them about the breath.
And somewhere around the forty-minute mark, when the laughing had wound down and the lasagna had been abandoned and Sef had gone to the loo, Priya picked up her glass, looked at him over the top of it, and said, lightly, no weight on it at all, in the tone you'd use to ask what someone had done at the weekend:
"So what's he like?"
And Elliot opened his mouth to answer.
And found that he couldn't do it in the voice he'd been using.
It was the strangest sensation. He reached for the register, the arch one, the one with the eyebrow in it, and it simply wasn't there, the way a step isn't there in the dark. He tried a second time. Nothing. And underneath the nothing, coming up fast, was the actual answer, the true one, fully formed and entirely unsuitable for the room, and he heard himself say, in a completely flat voice, before he could stop it:
"He's the kindest person I've ever met and he doesn't know it, and I think he's been lonely for about twenty years, and he'd be really embarrassed if he knew I'd said any of that."
The room went quiet.
Not awkward. Quiet.
Dom put the wine bottle down. Priya didn’t move at all.
"Right," Elliot said, into it. "Well. That's…ignore that. That's the wine."
"It's not the wine," said Priya.
"It's absolutely the wine, you've poured me about a litre…"
"Elliot." She was smiling, but she'd gone glassy round the eyes. "Do you know how long I've known you?"
"Don't."
"Fifteen years."
"Priya…"
"Fifteen years," she said, "and I have never once heard you describe a man without doing a voice."
Sef came back from the loo, took one look at the three faces, and said, "What? What happened? What did I miss?" and Dom said "nothing," and Priya said "nothing," and Elliot said "nothing," and the evening restarted, and within ten minutes it was noisy again and Sef was doing an impression of his line manager and the moment had folded itself away like it had never happened.
Elliot got the bus home at half eleven and sat on the top deck with his forehead against the cold glass, watching a blacked-out city that wasn't blacked out anymore go by in ordinary orange light.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Not the group chat. Off-channel. One-to-one.
Dom: you ok?
Two words. No punchline. It’d been the same two words after Marcus, and after his grandad, and after the thing in 2019 that they never talked about, and Elliot had answered every single one of them with a joke, because that was the arrangement, that was the deal, that was how you accepted the kindness without having to be the sort of person who needed it.
He looked at it for three stops.
He typed: ‘I'm great. I'm a nightmare. Standard’.
He looked at that for a while, too.
Then he deleted it, letter by letter, and typed something else, and sent it before he could reconsider, and turned his phone face-down on his knee like a man who has put something in a postbox.
Elliot: no. not really. I'll tell you about it properly sometime x
The reply came in about four seconds.
Dom: ok. whenever. x
And that was all. No follow-up, no questions, no ‘do you want to talk about it’. Just the door left open and the light left on, and Elliot Reyes sat on the top deck of the 63 with his ears burning and something enormous and unfamiliar sitting in his chest, and didn’t make a single joke about it.
All the way home.
*
Monday arrived.
Elliot got in at eight, took the stairs up, arrived damp, deployed the desk drawer deodorant, and sat down in front of eleven thousand lines of intercompany traffic.
And, this was the part he would tell people about later, in a different mood, he found it.
Not the four thousand, one hundred and sixteen. He found a piece of it: a recharge of eight hundred and forty pounds that Logistics had booked in September and Holdings hadn't picked up until October, which meant it was sitting in the wrong period on one side and not sitting anywhere at all on the other. It was not the whole answer. It was, however, the first honest ground he'd made on the thing in nine days, and for about ninety seconds he felt like himself: the noise off, the fence down, just the work and the fact that he was good at it.
Then he became aware that he was composing, somewhere at the back of his skull, a version of the discovery to tell someone.
He deleted the sentence out of his head with some violence and went back to the ledger.
The courier came at half two.
This was not, ordinarily, an event. Couriers came all day. The fourteenth floor had a system involving a laminated sheet nobody had read since 2021. But this one had a signed original that Marjorie needed for the pack, and reception had rung up to say it wouldn't be released to anyone but the named recipient, and the named recipient, because Elliot had typed his own name into a form six weeks ago while thinking about something else entirely, was Elliot.
Which meant the lobby.
He stood at the fire door for slightly longer than a person should stand at a fire door.
This is fine, he told himself. ‘He's nights. It's half two in the afternoon. He's asleep in a flat in Bermondsey with a balcony you can't stand on’.
He pushed through and crossed the black marble at a pace that would’ve looked, to any observer, like a man being pursued, signed the courier's screen with the little grey stick, took the envelope, and turned round.
Gav was at the desk. Moustache, reading glasses, a Tupperware.
Elliot's entire body changed temperature.
The relief came first, a full-body unclenching, the sort of relief where you become aware you'd been holding your shoulders somewhere up near your ears for nine days. And then, arriving about one and a half seconds later, uninvited, and considerably larger than the relief, came the other thing.
He stood in the middle of the lobby holding an envelope.
"All right?" said Gav.
"Yeah," said Elliot. "Yeah. Cheers."
He got about four steps before his mouth, entirely without a permit, said: "Quiet one?"
"Always is, Mondays." Gav turned a page of something. "You're the accounts lad. Fourteen."
"That's me."
"You were the one in the lift."
"...I was the one in the lift."
"Ha." Gav shook his head with the satisfaction. "Five and a half hours. Theo said."
And Elliot's heart did something so undignified in his chest that he had to look at the floor for a second.
"Did he," he said.
"Wrote it up. Four pages, incident report, he's a nightmare for the paperwork, that one." Gav sniffed. "Never says two words to your face and then writes you a novel."
"Right." ‘Do not ask. Do not ask. Do not ask’. "Is he…he's not on days now, is he? I thought I saw…"
"Doing a few. Covering Marek's shifts, he's had his shoulder done." Gav looked up. "Why, you after him?"
"No," said Elliot, far too fast. "God, no. I just…the lift. Wanted to say. About the lift. It's nothing."
"He's back on nights Wednesday."
"Right," said Elliot. "Great. Not that it…right. Cheers, Gav."
He went out through the revolving door instead of back to the stairs, which made no sense at all, and stood in the rain on Bishopsgate for a full minute with an envelope going soft in his hand.
‘He's back on nights Wednesday’.
‘Wednesday’.
"Get a grip," said Elliot, out loud, to a bus.
*
The meeting was at four, in Meeting Room 3, which had a broken blind and a smell.
"Right," said Marjorie. "Board pack. Nine a.m. tomorrow. I don't want to be standing in front of Ian Pellicorp explaining why page thirty-one has a hole in it, because I’ve done that, and I didn’t enjoy it, and neither did page thirty-one."
"It's all in," said Nadia. "Commentary's done."
"Commentary's done, appendices are done, and I've had the segmental in from Callum, which was…" Marjorie put on her glasses, looked at the screen, and took them off again "…which was a document."
"It was a draft," said Callum.
"It was a cry for help, Callum, but it's in." She turned. "Elliot. Supporting schedule."
"Signed original's in my drawer. I'll scan it and drop it in the folder tonight."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"Because it's the one page in the entire pack that has to be an original with a wet signature on it," said Marjorie, "because of a policy written in 2004 by a man who’s now dead, and which nobody has the authority to change, meaning that if that page is not in the folder by nine tomorrow morning we’re all going to have a fascinating time."
"It'll be in the folder."
"Say it again."
"It'll be in the folder, Marjorie."
"Good." She ticked something. "And the completeness checklist."
"I'll do it when the scan's in."
"Do it now, we're closing the pack at six."
And that, right there, four o'clock on a Monday afternoon, in a room with a broken blind, was the exact moment.
Elliot would go over it many times afterwards. He would go over it that night, viciously, on a set of concrete stairs. What happened was very small. Marjorie said ‘do it now’, and Elliot opened the checklist, which was a spreadsheet with forty-one line items and a column of dropdowns marked ATTACHED / N/A / OUTSTANDING, and he went down the column, and against item 29, Supporting schedule (signed original, scanned), he selected ATTACHED.
Because he was going to attach it. In about two hours. It was in his drawer, four meters away.
Nine days ago he wouldn’t have done that. Nine days ago he’d been a person who didn’t tick a box for a thing that hadn’t happened yet, on the grounds that the entire purpose of a box is that it describes reality, and that a man who ticks boxes about the future isn’t doing accounts, he’s doing astrology. He’d said that once, at a leaving do, and Nadia still quoted it at him.
He selected ATTACHED, and he saved the file, and he thought about a security guard writing four pages about him, and he closed his laptop.
He left at half nine.
He hadn't meant to. He'd meant to scan the schedule at six and go, but Marjorie had come back at ten past with a query on the segmental, and then Callum's draft had turned out to have a genuine problem in it, and by the time that was sorted the floor was empty and dark except for his one island of light, and it was half nine, and tired in a way that had stopped being about sleep.
He packed his bag. Turned off the monitor. And because the stairwell door was at the far end past the lift lobby, he walked down the length of the fourteenth floor in the dark, and came round the corner, and the lift doors opened.
Not the lift he'd have called. He hadn't called one.
They opened because someone was in it.
Theo was crouched down at the panel with the little steel hatch open and a torch in his teeth and a service key in one hand, checking something, resetting something, doing whatever it is that men do to lifts at half past nine at night, and the doors slid back and there he was, four feet away, in the light, lit up like an exhibit.
He was in the uniform. The shirt was too small. There was rain still on the shoulders of it from wherever he'd been. He had his sleeves shoved to the elbow, and he looked up.
They looked at each other.
Elliot didn’t move. He genuinely couldn’t have said, afterwards, whether he had been physically capable of movement. There was a strip of lift light across the carpet between them and a bag on his shoulder and a distance of about four feet, and in the middle of it, quite calmly, his entire body announced that it remembered everything.
The heat. The wall. The three inches.
Theo took the torch out of his mouth.
"Reyes," he said.
It came out low and slightly cracked and it was, Elliot noted from a great distance, the first word either of them had said to the other in nine days.
"Hi," said Elliot.
That was all he managed. ‘Hi’. Six letters short of a sentence, from a man who had once done four uninterrupted minutes on a laminated courier policy.
Theo's mouth opened.
And then something happened in his face, some door coming down, fast, the way a shop shutter comes down, and he looked back at the panel, and said, to it, in a completely different voice: "Won't be a minute. It's out of service. There's the other one round the…"
"I'm taking the stairs."
Theo's head came up again.
"You're taking the stairs," he said.
"I take the stairs." Elliot heard himself say it and had a full-body understanding, about half a second too late, of exactly how much information he had just handed over. "It's…cardio. It's a step-count thing. I'm competing with a man called Callum."
"Right," said Theo.
"So."
"So."
Neither of them moved.
And then the doors, on their own, on a timer, began to close.
Elliot could have put a hand out. It was one step and an arm's length. Every lift in the world has stopped for less. He watched the gap narrow and didn’t move, and through the closing gap he saw that Theo hadn't moved either, was still crouched there with the torch in his hand looking up at him with an expression Elliot couldn’t read at all and would spend a considerable portion of the night trying to.
The doors shut.
Elliot stood in the dark on the fourteenth floor for a moment.
Then he went and pushed through the stairwell door and started down, and the fire door boomed shut behind him.
He did fourteen floors. He came out into the loading bay at twenty to ten with absolutely no memory of the descent and he walked the long way round the block in the rain to Liverpool Street with his headphones in and nothing playing.
The Central line at ten o'clock on a Monday night has a particular population: the shift workers, the people who've stayed too late, the ones going home from something that didn't go well, and one man in a wet coat sitting with his bag on his knees staring at the advert opposite as though it had insulted his family.
The advert was for a mattress. Elliot had read it eleven times.
He was doing the thing where you replay four seconds of an interaction from every available angle. Reyes. Just that. Then a shutter coming down behind the man's eyes, and then some rubbish about the other lift being round the corner, and then Elliot, a professional communicator, a man who had once talked a traffic warden out of a ticket using nothing but a made-up anecdote about a dog, saying "hi."
‘Hi’.
And then standing there while a door closed on it. Actively standing there. Choosing, second by second, in real time, not to lift an arm.
The train went into the tunnel and the windows turned into mirrors and Elliot looked at himself in one, which he immediately regretted.
‘He'd have said something’, he thought. ‘If he'd wanted to say something, he'd have said it. He's had nine days. He knows what floor you're on. And he writes four-page reports about you and he has said nothing’.
Which was, he decided, fine. Which was actually clarifying. A person could get on with things. A person could stop taking the stairs, for a start, could put an end to the eleven-mile-a-week nonsense and go back to using a lift like a member of the species.
His phone rang.
The train was pulling into Stratford, the doors were opening, and the screen said MARJORIE PELLICORP in the capital letters he'd assigned it in a fit of pessimism eighteen months ago.
Elliot stared at it.
The doors gave their warning tone.
He got off the train, because you can’t take a call from Marjorie on a train, and stood on the platform at Stratford with the wind coming through and the doors closing behind him on the last easy version of his evening.
"Marjorie."
"Elliot." Terrifyingly pleasant. Marjorie's voice had exactly two settings, and the pleasant one was the bad one. "Quick question. Where's item twenty-nine?"
There was a silence in which Elliot's entire body understood before he did.
"Item twenty-nine," he said.
"Supporting schedule. Signed original, scanned. It's marked ATTACHED on the completeness checklist, which is your checklist, with your name at the top, and it’s not in the folder." A pause. "I've looked twice. I've had Nadia look. I've looked in the archive folder in case it went in the wrong one, and it hasn't, and now I'm at home in my dressing gown looking at a SharePoint folder with a hole in it, and Ian Pellicorp is going to be looking at a printed pack at nine o'clock tomorrow morning with the same hole in it, and page thirty-one is going to reference an appendix that doesn’t exist."
"It's in my drawer."
"I know it's in your drawer, Elliot. Where else would it be. It's been in your drawer since Thursday."
"I was going to scan it at six and then Callum's segmental…"
"I'm not interested in the narrative," said Marjorie, "I'm interested in the PDF."
Elliot shut his eyes and let the wind take a fair bit of the warmth out of him.
"I'll go back," he said.
"How far are you?"
"Stratford."
"Oh, Elliot."
"It's fine. It's twenty minutes. I'll get it scanned tonight."
"Do you want me to…"
"No. It's my box. I ticked it." He heard how he sounded and made a real effort. "It's fine, Marjorie, honestly. It'll be in the folder by half eleven."
There was a pause on the line, and when Marjorie spoke again she'd dropped the pleasant voice for something much closer to human, which was somehow worse.
"You've been off," she said. "For a fortnight. It's not a criticism. You've been off."
"I've been fine."
"Mm," said Marjorie. "Half eleven, then. And Elliot…take a taxi and expense it. Don't put it through as travel, put it through as stationery, nobody reads stationery."
And she rang off, leaving Elliot Reyes alone on a windy platform at Stratford at four minutes past ten with the strong sensation of having been, in some obscure way, mothered.
He got back to the tower at twenty to eleven.
Bishopsgate at that hour was in its emptied-out state, all the towers lit up and nobody in them, the buses coming past mostly empty, the rain stopped and everything shining. He came round the corner and looked up at Pellicorp, forty floors of dark glass with a few still lit where other people's disasters were unfolding, and then down at the lobby, which was a blazing box of light at the bottom of it, marble and bronze, entirely visible from the street.
He could see the desk from here.
He couldn’t, from this angle, see who was behind it.
‘He's covering days’, Elliot thought. ‘Gav said. He's on days till Wednesday, so he'll have gone home at six, and the night man will be some bloke, and this is all completely irrelevant, and I'm going to walk through the front door like a normal person because it's eleven o'clock at night and I've got a document to scan’.
He walked round the side of the building to the loading bay and let himself in with his fob.
The stairwell door was propped open with a fire extinguisher, which was a hanging offence, and Elliot noted this.
He looked up the stairwell.
The stairwell looked back.
Fourteen floors of switchback concrete going up into a strip-lit vanishing point, each landing with its yard-high grey stencil, and the whole thing perfectly silent apart from a hum somewhere high up that might have been a pump.
"Right," said Elliot.
GROUND. He set off at a good pace, taking them in twos, because he’d done this journey nine times a week for a fortnight and had built, he felt, a certain expertise. He was a man who took the stairs. That was who he was now. It was cardio.
2. Still in twos. Fine. Absolutely fine.
3. He noticed that the going-up version was substantially different from the going-down version, which he’d known intellectually but had somehow filed under ‘not a problem for tonight’.
4. Back to ones.
5. He undid his coat. This felt like a strategic decision rather than a defeat.
6. At the sixth-floor landing there was a fire extinguisher and a laminated sign that said IN CASE OF FIRE DO NOT USE LIFT and Elliot said, out loud, "Ahead of you there, mate," and then was slightly disturbed by the sound of his own voice in the concrete.
7. Halfway. He stopped on the seventh-floor landing with his hands on his knees and gave himself, generously, thirty seconds.
The building was extraordinarily quiet.
‘This is where the building keeps its bones’, he thought, and quite liked it, and then thought: ‘nobody uses these stairs. Nobody in the entire building uses these stairs except me’.
He straightened up and carried on.
8. The negotiation began around here. He informed himself that he’d take the lift down. Just down. Down was fine. Nobody could reasonably object to down.
9. He informed himself that he’d take the lift down and that this didn’t constitute a policy change.
10. He was sweating through his shirt in a way that made him deeply grateful there was nobody to see it, and he took his coat off entirely and carried it, and he thought ‘Eleven miles. That's Camden to Croydon. I’ve walked from Camden to Croydon in order to not see a man’.
11. "This is the stupidest thing," he said, out loud, to the eleventh-floor landing. "This is the single stupidest thing I’ve ever done and I once got a tattoo in Zante."
12. He sat down on the top step of the twelfth flight.
He wasn't proud of it. He sat down on a concrete step in a service stairwell at eleven o'clock at night with his coat over his arm and his bag on the floor and his tie pulled loose, and he put his head back against the breezeblock and had a short, frank, entirely internal conversation with himself which went, in summary:
‘You’re not doing cardio.
I’m doing cardio.
You’re hiding from a security guard.
I’m doing CARDIO.
You have restructured your entire physical relationship with your place of work, an eleven-mile-a-week restructure, you have started carrying deodorant, you have a personal best, you have a route that adds four hundred meters to a coffee, and all of it exists so that you don’t have to walk fifteen meters across a lobby, and you can’t tell whether that's because you can't bear him to look at you, or because you can't bear it if he doesn't’.
Elliot opened his eyes and looked at the underside of the flight above him.
"Yeah," he said. "All right."
13. He got up, because sitting on the floor of a stairwell was not a life, and did the thirteenth flight in a state of philosophical exhaustion, and came out onto the thirteenth-floor landing, and stopped to breathe.
Thirteen was, in a building like this, a slightly haunted number, the lift went from twelve to fourteen, on the grounds that Ian Pellicorp had had a nervous American investor in 2011, which meant that floor thirteen existed on the stairs and nowhere else. It was plant, mostly. Risers, comms, a locked door with a warning triangle. The one strip light up here had a fault in it and did a slow flicker, on-on-on-off-on, about once every four seconds.
Elliot stood under it with his hands on his hips and his heart going and his shirt stuck to his back and one more flight to climb.
"Fourteen," he said to himself. "Get the schedule. Scan it. Go home."
And then, below him, three, maybe four flights down, in the enormous vertical silence of the concrete spine, a door opened.
Then footsteps.
Boots on concrete. Heavy. Coming up.
There were, he established rapidly, four options.
He could go up. One flight, through the fire door, onto fourteen, and be gone before the man got here, except that the fire door on fourteen was the loudest object in the building and boomed like a dropped skip, and there is no dignity in a man being heard to flee.
He could go down, which would mean walking directly into him.
He could stay where he was and act natural, whatever that meant on the thirteenth floor of a building at eleven o'clock at night.
Or he could get through the locked plant room door with the warning triangle on it and live there.
The footsteps came up past ten. Past eleven. There was a pause on the twelfth landing, long enough that Elliot's heart got up into his throat and stayed there, and then they started again, and he understood that the pause had been a man stopping to listen, and that a man doesn’t stop to listen unless he’s heard something, and that what he’d heard was Elliot standing very still.
‘Act natural’, Elliot decided, on no evidence whatsoever, and got his phone out and looked at it.
Theo came round the half-landing.
He came up three steps and saw him and stopped dead with one hand on the rail, and for a second the two of them just stayed like that: Elliot on the landing with his coat over his arm and his tie loose and his shirt stuck to him, and Theo four steps below with his radio at his shoulder and his torch on his belt and an expression of absolute, undisguised panic.
The strip light did its thing. On-on-on-off-on.
"Reyes."
"Marchetti."
Silence.
"You're…" Theo cleared his throat. "You all right?"
"Yep."
"Right."
"You?"
"Yeah."
More silence. It was, Elliot thought, from a long way outside his own body, possibly the worst conversation he had ever participated in, and he’d once had to make small talk with an ex's mother in a hospice.
Theo came up the last four steps onto the landing.
The size of him did what it always did. It rearranged the available space. Elliot took a half-step back that he hadn’t authorized and found the breezeblock wall.
"Rounds," Theo said, holding up a fob, unnecessarily, as though he'd been asked for papers. "Every two hours. Fire doors."
"Right."
"There's a door propped downstairs. Extinguisher through it. Someone's…" he gestured vaguely at the whole building "…people do it for the smoking."
"That's a hanging offence, that."
"It is, yeah."
"I noticed it on the way in and I had a feeling about it."
"Did you."
"Strong feeling. Very strong. I read the fire policy once for an audit and I've been unbearable about it ever since." Elliot heard himself producing sentences and noted, with distant professional interest, that none of them were any good. This was the material. This was what was coming out. Fourteen years of practice, four months of preparation, a man he had thought about approximately nine hundred times in nine days, and what he had brought to the encounter was ‘fire door compliance’. "Anyway."
"Anyway."
"You're on days," Elliot said. "Gav said. Marek's shoulder."
Theo's eyes came up.
"You asked Gav," he said.
And there it was: the first real thing, dropped into the middle of the landing like something falling off a shelf, and neither of them able to pick it up.
"It came up," said Elliot.
"Right."
"In conversation. He mentioned it. He mentioned about your report and all…four pages, apparently." He was talking too fast now, the words coming out ahead of any decision to say them. "He said you're a nightmare for the paperwork."
"It's the procedure."
"Is it four pages of procedure?"
"There's boxes," said Theo. "There's a lot of boxes."
"And what did you put in the boxes?"
"What happened."
"All of it?"
The question came out and it was much too big and it changed the temperature of the entire stairwell. He watched it land. He watched Theo take it, and hold it, and look at the wall.
"No," Theo said. "Not all of it."
Elliot's pulse was going in his ears.
‘Say something’, he thought. ‘You've had nine days and eleven miles of thinking time, say the actual thing’.
"I've been taking the stairs," he said.
Theo looked at him.
"I know," he said.
"No, I mean…" Elliot laughed, and it came out wrong, hoarse and unfunny. "I've been taking them all the time. Every day. Both ways. Since the Friday. Fourteen floors, twice a day, and there's a route round the back for the coffee that adds four hundred meters, and I've done…" and here his voice did something he was not expecting, went thin at the edges "…I did the math, and it's…eleven miles. Eleven miles."
The silence that followed had a completely different quality.
"Eleven miles," said Theo.
"Camden to Croydon." Elliot said, "That's what I've been telling everyone, and it's a great line, honestly, it's got a step-count competition in it and everything, there's a whole bit about a bloke called Callum…" He stopped. He put the heel of his hand against his eye for a second. "Sorry. Sorry. I do that. I've been told about it, actually, quite recently, by someone who noticed. I do a thing where I…"
"I know."
"Yeah," said Elliot. "Yeah, you do."
He let his coat drop onto the step beside his bag, because he was too hot and his arms had started to shake slightly from the climb, or from something.
"Why d'you take the stairs, then?" Theo said. Quietly.
"You know why."
Elliot became aware that they had got closer. He couldn’t identify the moment. Nobody had taken a step, as far as he was aware, and yet the four feet of landing had somehow become two, and Theo was standing on the top step and Elliot was against the wall.
Elliot could hear Theo breathing. That was the beginning of the end of it, really. He could hear the man breathing, fast, unsteady, nothing at all like the slow contained thing he'd fallen asleep next to, and he could see his pulse going in his throat above the collar, and he could smell him.
And it was the same.
That was what broke it. That was the exact hinge. He got the whole thing at once, the clean sweat and the cheap detergent and the cedar-or-tobacco-or-neither, the identical composition he had carried around in his head for nine days, the thing he had memorized on purpose at twenty past four in the morning in a burning building of a decision, ‘keep this’, and here it was again, in the actual world, on the actual man, unchanged.
He'd got it right. He'd kept it perfectly. He'd been carrying an exact copy.
Something went out from under him.
"Reyes," Theo said. Ragged.
"Yeah."
"I don't know how to…"
Elliot closed the last of it.
He got a fistful of the front of the uniform shirt and pulled, and Theo came. Came like a wall coming down, like something that had been leaning on nothing for years, and their mouths met somewhere in the middle with more force than either of them intended, hard enough that Elliot's head knocked back against the breezeblock and he didn't care, didn't register it at all except as information about how much of the man's weight had arrived at once.
It wasn’t gentle. There was no version of this that was going to be gentle. Nine days and four months came into it all at the same time and there was nothing careful left over: Theo's hand came up and took the side of Elliot's face and jaw, engulfed it, the whole span of it, and held him there while he kissed him like he’d been holding his breath since he was a boy and had finally been told he could stop.
Elliot made a sound he had never made before.
And the sound did something to Theo, Elliot felt it happen, because the hand slid back into his hair and closed, and the other one landed at his waist and gathered him in bodily, lifted him half onto his toes without any apparent effort, and the wall came against his back and stayed there.
It should’ve been frightening, being handled like that. It wasn’t remotely frightening. It was the single least frightened Elliot Reyes had been in about eleven years.
He got his arms up round the neck and the shoulders, over the breadth of them, and found he couldn’t get anywhere near all the way round, and made another sound about that. He was aware of heat, and stubble, and the astonishing solidity of him, the sheer amount of person, all of it hard and warm and shaking very slightly under his hands, which was the detail that undid him completely, that a man built like that could be shaking.
Theo pulled back an inch and they breathed at each other, foreheads together, and Elliot got out half a word, "God", and then it was Theo who came back in, Theo who took his mouth again with a kind of famished carelessness, and Elliot's hands were in his hair and the radio at the man's shoulder was digging into his chest.
Push and pull. One of them backing off half an inch to breathe and the other one closing it immediately. Elliot's fingers finding the hem of the uniform shirt at the small of Theo's back and slipping under, flat against skin damp with the climb, and Theo's whole body going rigid at the contact and then, catastrophically, into it, pressing him harder into the wall, a low sound in his throat, one hand splayed across Elliot's ribs and moving.
It was, Elliot would think later, much later, when he could think, the first entirely honest thing he had done in his adult life. There was no performance in it anywhere. He wasn't being funny. He wasn't watching himself do it. He wasn't composing the version he'd tell at a party. He was simply, wholly, stupidly there, in a stairwell, with his hands on a man's back, wanting something with a plainness that had no jokes in it at all, and being wanted back with an urgency that was frankly making it difficult to stand up.
Which was, of course, when it stopped.
Theo came off him.
The whole warm architecture of it was simply gone, the weight, the hands, the heat, and Elliot was against a wall with his shirt half out and his mouth stinging, and there were suddenly four feet of landing between them, and Theo was flat against the opposite wall with his arm across his own mouth and his eyes enormous.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry…that was…I shouldn't have…"
"It's all right." Elliot pushed off the wall. His legs were not doing well.
"I can't do this," Theo said.
He said it to the floor. He was already reaching for the rail.
He went fast, in that heavy unhurried tread turned frantic, and the sound of it went down the concrete spine of the building, twelve, eleven, and Elliot stood at the rail with his hand out saying "Marchetti…" and got nothing back, and then, two floors down, the fire door boomed.
The sound came up the shaft and hit the ceiling and rolled around and died.
And then it was very quiet.
Elliot’s hands were shaking. His mouth hurt. His shirt was out of his trousers on one side and his tie was somewhere down by his sternum and there was a coat and a bag on the step where he'd dropped them, and above him the faulty strip light went on-on-on-off-on, taking the room away and giving it back, taking it away and giving it back.
"Right," he said, to nobody, on a floor that didn’t officially exist.
And then, because there was nothing else available:
"Brilliant."
He went up the last flight like someone going up to have a word with someone.
Every step was an argument. ‘Nine days’. Bang. ‘Nine days of not looking at me, and one lift, and one torch, and 'the other one's round the corner'. Bang. ‘And then you put your hands on me like that, and then you say sorry’. Bang. ‘Sorry?’.
He hit the fourteenth-floor fire door with the flat of both hands and it boomed open into the office.
Elliot walked the length of it, threw his bag on his desk, yanked open the drawer, and there it was: the supporting schedule, signed in wet blue ink by a director who had gone home at six on Thursday, one sheet of A4 that’d cost him a train journey, a stairwell, eleven miles of walking and, apparently, the entire structure of his emotional life.
He looked at it.
"You," he said, "are the least of my problems."
He took it to the multifunction device by the print room and scanned it, and it came through crooked, and he scanned it again, and it came through fine, and he sat down at his desk in his coat and dropped the PDF into the folder and updated the checklist so that item twenty-nine now said ATTACHED and was, for the first time in his professional life, retrospectively true.
Then he wrote:
‘Marjorie, item 29 is in the folder. Apologies for the drama.
E.’
He sent it. The mail made its small departing noise.
And that was it. That was the emergency. Four minutes of admin and a crooked scan, and the whole thing was over, and somewhere below him in this building was a man who had held his face in one hand like it was something he'd been given to look after and then run down a fire escape.
Elliot sat back in his chair.
He was, he realized, absolutely furious.
Not the fast hot sort. Something colder and better organized, sitting up straight in his chest, and, this was the surprising part, most of it wasn't even pointed at Theo.
‘I've been hiding in a stairwell’.
He looked at the dark office. Forty desks. The window with the City going about its evening on the other side of it: bank towers, the bridge, the slow red crawl of buses over the river.
‘Nine days in a stairwell. Eleven miles. Before that, eleven months of doing the Marcus story as a bit and getting the laugh every time and never once telling a single human being that it took something out of me. Before that…what? Fourteen? Eleven?’
‘Getting there first so nobody could get there before me. Being the funny one so nobody could look at me properly.’
‘Fifteen years, and I've never once heard you describe a man without doing a voice.’
He thought about standing in a service corridor next to a trolley of blue roll, flattened against breezeblock, hiding from a man who, it turned out, after nine days and eleven miles, had been standing in that lobby watching the lift indicator come down from fourteen and knowing he wasn't in it.
"No," said Elliot Reyes, out loud, on the fourteenth floor.
He stood up. He got his bag. He put his coat on properly, both arms, and did up the buttons, and pulled his tie off entirely and shoved it in his pocket, and tucked his shirt back in on the side where it had come out.
And he walked down the dark office to the stairwell door and put his hand on the push bar.
And stopped.
For a second he stood there with his palm flat on the cold steel and the whole familiar machinery available to him: fourteen flights, four minutes forty, out through the loading bay, round the block, in the dark, in the rain, alone, nobody seeing him, nobody ever seeing him.
No.
He took his hand off the bar.
"No," he said again, and something in his chest came up off the floor.
He turned round and walked back across the fourteenth floor, past his desk, past the dead coffee machine with the Comic Sans apology still taped to it, round the corner, to the lift lobby, and he stood in front of the doors of the lift that had broken with him inside it, in the middle of a building he’d spent nine days navigating like a fugitive, and he pressed the call button.
Then he got his headphones out of his bag.
He put them on, and the world went to that particular padded hush, and he scrolled with his thumb, past the podcasts, past the walking-to-work stuff, past everything sensible, and found it.
Fever Beat. Emilie Reed.
He'd had it on the ‘for later’ list since March and had never once played it.
He pressed play.
It came in the way it always came in: no words, just that long high wordless call, a woman's voice going up and out over nothing, half incantation and half taunt, and then the bass arrived underneath it, low and unhurried and enormous, and something in Elliot's spine reorganized itself.
‘Oh mirror mirror on the wall who is the cruelest of them all
Oh mystic man can't you see
I'm the high priestess you won't take my throne from me
But you got me hooked
You got me hooked
On the fever beat
On the fever beat
On the fever beat’
The lift chimed. The doors opened. He got in.
He watched himself in the brushed steel as they closed: coat, bag, hair a total insurrection, mouth still faintly wrecked, green eyes bright the way they went when he was being a menace. And the song moved into the verse, that sly mirror-mirror bit, the woman asking who's the cruelest of them all, and Elliot, alone in a 1987 lift with a private grin arriving on his face, thought: ‘yeah. All right. Here we go’.
Fourteen. Twelve. Nine.
By eight the song had got where it was going. It was the sort of track that didn't build so much as simply announce itself and then refuse to apologize: the hook coming round again and again, the same line looping and thickening, half boast and half confession, someone on a throne telling somebody that they might have got to him but he was still the one running it.
‘Who wins who falls
Oh foolish man can't you see
I live rent free in your deluded fantasy
But did she make you believe
She'd be the one to sing you to sleep
Oh your violin is loud
You're the victim in the crowd
But your tears they can't compete with the fever beat’
Which was, Elliot thought, the single most accurate description of his current situation.
Because both things were true.
He was completely, catastrophically gone on a man who had just left him standing in a stairwell, hooked, absolutely, embarrassingly, the whole thing, and he was also, still, entirely and specifically himself. Elliot Reyes. Twenty-five. Funniest person on any given floor. Best pair of shoulders in accounts and a mouth that had cleared a bus stop at fourteen. The high priestess of the fourteenth floor, currently descending, with a board pack filed and a crooked scan corrected and no further plans to use a stairwell for the rest of his natural life.
Four. Three. Two.
‘Ping’.
The doors opened onto the lobby.
It was a quarter past eleven and every light in the place was blazing, the black marble drinking them, the bronze catching, the long reflections lying across the floor like a lake. The ugly canvas. The prow of the reception desk. The tall windows and beyond them Bishopsgate, wet, gold, empty.
And Theo, behind the desk, blue-lit from below, head down over the log book.
Elliot stepped out.
He didn’t hurry. He’d crossed this lobby perhaps two hundred times in fourteen months and every single one of them had been a transit, a getting from one side to the other, quickly, with a joke ready in case anyone looked, and this one wasn't. This one he took at exactly the pace of the bassline, which was unhurried and low and about four inches taller than his usual walk, and he took it straight down the middle of the floor, right across the widest part of the marble, in the full blaze of the lights, where a man behind a desk couldn’t possibly miss him.
He didn't look at the desk.
He looked straight ahead, at the revolving door, and he let the song do what the song was doing, that great insolent thumping thing, the hook coming round again, all inferno and no apology.
‘An angel will drown
Put her halo in the ground
But karma will creep
Be the one to sing you to sleep
Oh your violin is loud, you’re the victim in the crowd
Oh let the sad music makers take their bow
Oh try and escape the sound the Thumping inferno is loud of the fever beat
Of the fever beat
Of the fever beat
I want my fever beat’
He crossed the last of the marble.
He hit the revolving door with one hand flat on the brass and pushed, and the door began to turn, and he stepped into the segment, and it was there, in the second and a half that a revolving door gives you, in the curved glass swinging round with the whole bright lobby reversed and reflected in it, that he saw him.
Theo was standing up.
He’d come out from behind the desk and he’d stopped about two paces clear of it. Standing in the middle of a blazing empty lobby at a quarter past eleven at night watching Elliot Reyes walk away from him with his whole face open and his hands at his sides and an expression on him that Elliot had absolutely no trouble reading at all.
It was hunger.
Plain.
Undefended.
And slightly desperate.
(To be continued…)
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