The Other Landing

Dear Niall,

I took the lift down to salt the front steps, as I have done every winter since you died.

The snow had come quietly. It lay along the parked cars and filled the gutters level with the road. Inside, the building smelled of wet wool and boiled cabbage. Someone on the fourth floor was playing scales on a clarinet, always stopping before the final note.

You would remember the lift. The brass gate bites if you let it close too quickly, and the button for the basement has been worn blank by thumbs. I pressed it with my elbow because I was carrying the salt bucket.

The lift passed the basement.

There was no jolt. The cables merely continued their soft complaint above me. After a little while the gate opened onto a tiled landing.

It resembled our basement, but not closely enough to be mistaken for it. The pipes ran along the opposite wall. The light had a green shade instead of a wire cage. There was no damp patch beneath the meter cupboard, although I could smell damp earth and something sweet, like apples stored too long.

A man was waiting there.

He wore your brown coat. Not the one we buried you in, but the old coat with the torn pocket, the one Mam gave away after you became ill. He had your narrow shoulders and the pale patch beneath his chin where the beard never grew.

He was older than you had been.

“Nell,” he said.

You called me that when we were children. Nobody else has called me Nell for years.

I did not leave the lift. He did not try to enter it. We stood with the gate between us while the clarinet sounded faintly through the ceiling, though there could have been no ceiling above that place belonging to our building.

He asked whether Mam still cut the crusts from her toast. He remembered the linnet that flew into the pantry window. He remembered carrying me home from the frozen pond with one red sock and one bare foot.

Some things he remembered wrongly.

He said the pond was behind the chapel, not beside it. He called the linnet a thrush. He claimed you had hidden the broken blue bowl under your bed, when I know I hid it beneath mine.

I began to think he had been assembled from overheard stories. A careful stranger wearing your life, with the seams showing.

Then he smiled, and I saw the thin scar above his right eyebrow.

“Yours was on the left,” I said.

His smile went away.

“It was left to me. You learned my face in the hall mirror.”

The lift bell rang.

I had forgotten that summer after the accident, when your eye was bandaged and you would only let me change the dressing if I watched you in the mirror. I had forgotten brushing my teeth beside your reflection, and talking to it while you shaved. Even now, when I picture you, you are standing on the wrong side of yourself.

The gate began to close. He put his hand through and held it for a moment. His fingers were warm despite the cold landing.

“Bring the blue bowl next time,” he said.

Then I was in our basement, facing the familiar damp patch. The salt had spilled in a white circle around my shoes.

There has been no next time. The lift stops where it should. The green-shaded light does not appear below us. Mam says there was never a blue bowl, but she is old now, and I no longer trust the direction of anyone’s remembering.

I am writing because there was one thing I did not say.

You were almost right, Niall. Almost entirely right.

When I look into the hall mirror now, I sometimes see the sister you were expecting. She parts her hair on the other side.