Falling Upwards

By Alisha Sufit

Two years after her husband abandons her for another woman, Sophie Luce is descending into depression, her drinking out of control. With her son at university, apart from Anya, her eccentric Polish lodger, she lives alone in a rambling house in north London, unable to cope. The upstairs heating system breaks down and Sophie has to find someone to repair it, leading to a bizarre chain of events, dramatic and macabre, which change her life for ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alisha Sufit
• Release date: Sep 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781902217031

Alisha Sufit

Alisha Sufit is an artist, musician, poet and author. She was the singer songwriter with the 1970s band Magic Carpet, whose eponymous first album released in 1972 has since become a sought after collectable. It was an early example of Indian influenced psychedelic progressive folk-based music.She studied painting and etching at Chelsea School of Art, London, and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux Arts in Paris, followed later by a post graduate course at Central St Martin's. Some of her artwork and poetry can be viewed at www.alishasufit.comFrom the late 1960s she has written poetry, songs, short stories and more recently the novel Falling Upwards. She is also the author of a collection of poetry with ten illustrations entitled Moon Clippings. She currently lives in London, UK.

Book preview

FALLING UPWARDS

by

Alisha Sufit

First published in 2012 by Magic Carpet Books, London, UK

www.magiccarpetbooks.co.uk

[e-mail]

Copyright © Alisha Sufit 1998

First published 2012

Front cover illustration: oil painting by Alisha Sufit

The right of Alisha Sufit to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978 1 902217 03 1

Other works by Alisha Sufit: Moon Clippings: a collection of poetry with illustrations.

Free

I thought of life

as though it were a space

with walls and floor and ceiling,

sought to make it solid, fixed,

construct it well,

so I should have security of place.

Then I heard the small stars’

laughter pealing far away.

Fall! they cried, and fly,

for you cannot break your bones

nor die.

There is no ground

upon which you can land.

It’s all pure ether,

solid as the sand

that fills Egyptian deserts,

solid as the water in the sea.

Let go and fall

and then you will be free.

Alisha Sufit

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter One

Sophie moved to the big bay window at the back of the sitting-room and gazed out at the northerly view: a sprawl of red brick houses stretched across the vale to the far sweep of Muswell Hill, where the massive bulk of Alexandra Palace loomed high on the misty horizon. Her eyes wandered westward to the dark shape of Highgate Wood and then back to the garden sloping away behind the house. Heavy clouds moved ponderously across the wide sky but there was no wind to stir the tawny-tinged leaves on the trees or the Michaelmas daisies turning to seed in the overgrown beds below. Sophie had little fondness for this time of year, when summer loses its grip and everything is tired and spent.

A distant train clanked and groaned out of sight in the valley and she mused that it might be the slow train to Cambridge, where her husband now lived. She calculated the time – two years and almost eight months – since Philip had left her for his new woman. Chafing sadness had only recently given way to numbing depression, but Sophie was scarcely aware of the change.

A movement in the garden caught her attention as a ripe pear surrendered its weight, plummeting down through the branches to the ground, startling the sleeping cat at the foot of the tree. Nelson got up and delicately made his way through a tangle of foliage, soon slipping from view.

As Sophie turned from the window, her eye fell on a photograph on the table nearby. The image of her son, Thomas, stared up at her, his youthful face fixed in a fleeting grin, his dark hair tousled by the wind. He was away on holiday in Spain, soon to begin his second year at university, and the photo only served to remind Sophie of how much she missed his presence in the house. She was about to pick it up when she heard a gentle knock at the half-open door.

‘Hello, may I speak with you?’

Sophie crossed the room to greet her lodger, hovering in the hall. ‘Hi Anya, is something wrong?’ The girl’s worried look filled Sophie with mild alarm.

‘Excuse me, I disturb you, but the boiler . . .’ said Anya, with a grimace. The skin of her gaunt face was pallid and there was a faint, acidic odour on her breath which Sophie puzzled to identify.

‘Oh, dear, is it playing up again?’

‘I bang, like Gavin, but it don’t work,’ Anya whined.

There was a moment of incomprehension before Sophie realised the girl was referring to the thump that her other tenant regularly gave the machine to get it going.

‘Too long to switch on, to make hot water.’ Anya spoke with a strong Polish accent, struggling with the words, a hint of irritation in her pale blue eyes. Sophie noted that her dyed blonde hair was darkening at the roots.

‘I’m really sorry, I’ve been so busy, I forgot. I’ll sort it out right now,’ said Sophie, trying to sound reassuring.

Unconvinced, Anya forced a smile and withdrew to the foot of the stairs. For a moment, her landlady’s eyes followed her, taking in the thinness of her long, bony legs revealed by a short, red skirt, as she started back up to her territory on the upper floors.

Sophie crossed the hall to the study to phone her friend, Amanda, for advice. Pickled gherkins! At last her memory named the smell. Anya was addicted to them in the way some people are to chocolate. Sophie dialled and waited patiently in the small, cluttered room, a syrupy sun emerging briefly from the clouds, warming her through the dusty window glass.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Amanda, it’s me. Are you all right? You sound out of breath.’

‘Sophie! Yes, I’m fine. I was in the garden, tidying up. I ran in.’

‘Sorry to drag you away but I’m desperate. Do you know of a good plumber? The boiler upstairs is on the blink.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Anya’s just complained again. I feel really bad as it’s ages since she first told me about it and I still haven’t done anything. I’ve got to get it fixed.’

‘Yes, as it happens I know a really good bloke,’ Amanda volunteered enthusiastically. ‘He’s quite elderly, officially retired, but he used to work on ships’ boilers. He sorted out my radiators. He’s as straight as a die and he hardly charges a thing!’

Having long harboured a deep mistrust of plumbers, Sophie was relieved to be told of Mr Cranke’s existence. Five minutes later she rang off and dialled his number.

In the small kitchen of a modest terraced house in the nether regions of north London, Mr and Mrs Cranke had just sat down to enjoy their weekly pork pie, a keenly anticipated ritual. At the sound of the phone, Mr Cranke emitted a sharp protest somewhere between a click and a hiss. He pulled his rayon serviette from the top of his beige V-neck sweater and got up, snatching the receiver from its cradle on the wall.

‘Who is it?’ he barked, his voice loud in compensation for his own loss of hearing. He did not like to be disturbed of a Sunday evening, but listening to the plaintive female voice he was eventually persuaded to make an appointment for the next morning, the last day of Sophie’s summer break from teaching.

A watery sun shone from the sky as Mr Cranke arrived punctually at nine-thirty. He parked his brown Reliant Robin three-wheeler in the sloping side-street next to the house and, tool-bag in hand, walked briskly up the front path to the four storey red-brick building, where he rang the bell. As he waited, he cast a critical eye over the accumulated grime and flaking paint on the window sills. A scattering of autumn leaves remained unswept on the steps, and a cluster of dormant snails nestled in a corner of the porch. Then the door opened and a graceful woman with pale skin and long chestnut hair appeared before him.

‘Mr Cranke?’

‘Yes, and you’re Mrs Luce, I presume?’

Sophie nodded and a moment later was leading the way up to the lodgers’ kitchen.

A small, alert man, his back permanently stooped with age, Mr Cranke put Sophie at ease with his old-fashioned manner, and she watched optimistically as, spanner in hand, he tinkered with the complicated machine, loosening this and tightening that, his shirt sleeves neatly rolled back to the elbow. Mr Cranke was in no hurry and Sophie’s attention soon strayed to the dingy white walls beyond his head, where the lining paper was twisted and buckled in the corners. She realised it was too long since the room had last been redecorated.

‘Nothing wrong there, she’s as sweet as a nut!’ Mr Cranke announced at last.

‘Oh, dear,’ murmured Sophie, with a frown, ‘my lodgers are convinced it’s not working properly. Surely it’s supposed to start up a bit faster?’

‘How old are your lodgers?’ demanded Cranke, peering at her through his pebble lenses. Sophie pondered for a moment. ‘Um . . . Anya’s about twenty-five, but I think Gavin’s only twenty-two.’

‘That’s it!’ said Cranke, with some ferocity. ‘It’s the young of today! They’ve got no patience at all. You have to wait for the diaphragm to open up before it’ll come on, and they’re not prepared. The young of today expect it all to happen instantaneously!’

Availing himself of a chair, Mr Cranke clambered up on to the kitchen table to replace the boiler casing. Meanwhile, Sophie’s mind wandered again, as Cranke’s quirky choice of words swept her back to Dr Huntingford’s surgery, where she had first been kitted out with contraception just after her eighteenth birthday. Hunt the Cunt was the ribald nickname the students had given the crusading gynaecologist, an enthusiastic woman of fifty, who had fitted half the female undergraduates with Dutch caps at the art school Sophie attended. Sophie cringed inwardly as she recalled how Dr Huntingford had asked her to squat, knickers off, to practice ‘popping the cap inside.’

‘You’ve got to use plenty of spermicide!’ she would boom with a keen smile and a glint in her eye. ‘Squeeze the two sides together and in we go!’

Covered with gel, the rubber diaphragm had been impossibly slippery and Sophie remembered with horror how the device had shot out of her grasp, landing with an ominous plop on the polished lino. It had stared up at her accusingly – a large toffee-coloured eye, a malevolent bubble in a mud swamp. Sophie had never blushed so vividly in her life. She thought her cheeks would haemorrhage with embarrassment. Then, in a flash, she remembered Adam, her first love, the melting excitement and the clumsy delays inserting the odious piece of rubber before she could open up and come on, as Mr Cranke might have it . . .

‘Mrs Luce!’ snapped Cranke. ‘You drifted off there.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Sophie, with a little start. ‘Yes, that reminds me . . . what were you saying?’

Mr Cranke jumped down from the table, landing heavily on both feet like some sprightly, oversized gnome. Sophie was astounded by his agility and wondered for a moment if the floorboards would survive the strain.

‘No, nothing wrong there,’ he stubbornly insisted.

Sophie pursed her lips and made no comment. Perhaps her lodgers did expect too much and were simply young and impatient, but part of her knew that trouble lay ahead. ‘What do I owe you?’ she asked, vulnerable as a beetle on its back.

‘Nothing. I didn’t do nothing, did I?’ chirped Cranke. ‘Pay me next time when I do do something.’

‘Oh, please, I must, your time . . .’ Sophie protested feebly, but Mr Cranke was already trotting down the stairs, heading for the front door, readying himself for his next port of call.

Sophie dutifully followed him down. ‘Where are you parked?’ she asked, hesitating in the hallway.

‘Round the side.’

‘Then I’ll let you out through the basement,’ said Sophie.

She led the way down the steep winding stairwell at the back of the hall into the kitchen below. Because of the sharp gradient of the hill, what was basement level at the front of the house became ground level at the back. They crossed the kitchen, emerging through French windows into a decrepit conservatory. To their left was the flank wall through which was an exit to the side-street.

As Sophie opened the door to usher him out, Mr Cranke turned to her, his face severe. ‘Those stairs down to the basement don’t meet building regulations,’ he cautioned. ‘You’ve got winders all the way. You wanna be careful, you could be liable for accidents. You could get sued!’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, they are rather dangerous,’ said Sophie. ‘I came a cropper once myself. I had the worst haematoma the doctor had ever seen.’

‘Big bruise on yer bum, was it?’ simplified Mr Cranke, with no trace of humour.

Sophie coloured and suppressed a smile. She made a mental note to destroy the photograph Philip had taken of her plum-coloured cheek.

The original staircase to the kitchen had long ago collapsed from wood worm and wet rot, and it was some years since Philip had commissioned the replacement. The chosen carpenter had measured up and gone off, returning after a week with a flight of ready-made stairs which he then cajoled and bullied for a whole afternoon, finally nailing them into position. Each tread was a perilous, tapering wedge shape, reminiscent of a mediaeval winding stair, but Sophie and Philip were not unduly concerned as their son, Thomas, was nearly fourteen and there were rarely any small children or elderly people in the house. It was only later that they were told the stairs did not comply with requirements.

‘Did you put them stairs in?’ quizzed Cranke, dogged as an old terrier. Earlier, he had been at a loss with the malfunctioning boiler, something he did not care to admit. The irregular stairs offered him the opportunity to reassert himself.

‘We had them done some time back,’ Sophie confessed.

‘Did you get planning permission?’ He was in full sail now.

‘No, I don’t think we did in the end.’ Sophie looked duly contrite.

‘Well, I can tell you one thing – if an official from the council sees ’em, you’ll have to take ’em out. They’re illegal!’

He fixed her with his beady eye and Sophie began to feel irritated.

‘I’ll bear it in mind, Mr Cranke. But thanks so much for . . . for looking at the boiler.’

Cranke walked away and Sophie closed the door, pausing to reflect. Gavin had handed in his notice and was due to leave at the end of the month, so she reckoned the lack of hot water would be less of a concern for him. Anya was another matter. But nevertheless Sophie managed to procrastinate for several months more. It was not until early in the following year that things finally came to a head when Anya lost her temper to a degree rarely witnessed west of Gdansk, and the delicate balance betwixt landlady and tenant was for ever altered.

The two women met only rarely, as Anya’s bedroom was on the topmost floor while Sophie spent most of her time, mole-like, in the depths below. When Anya had first come to the house she had described herself as a beautician. She had had a positive and healthy air and Sophie was pleased that she got on with Gavin so well. But there was a growing change in the young woman which seemed to date from the time of Gavin’s departure. Anya’s appearance had become increasingly eccentric as she ranged about on the upper floors on her own, her large feet clad in knee-high woollen slippers, hand-knitted by her grandmother in Cracow, her formerly loosely worn hair tightly drawn back into a ragged ponytail. As far as Sophie was aware, her lodger received no visitors and few phone calls.

Apart from Nelson the cat, Sophie and Anya were now the sole occupants of 63 Mount Road. Occasionally their paths crossed in the hall and Sophie noted that the length of Anya’s skirts had shortened alarmingly, the hems rising close to the crotch of her knickers. At the same time, the girl had become obsessed with cleanliness in a peculiarly selective way: the bathtub and basin gleamed white, whilst the upper landing and kitchen floors remained peppered with dust and debris.

Then came the subject of colonic irrigation. Anya’s job in a local beauty clinic had expanded to include attention to the inner, as well as outer, state of the body. With all the zeal of the newly converted, she recommended to her landlady the virtues of a well-irrigated bowel. For reassurance, Anya even showed Sophie her own personal equipment – the ridged tubing with its gleaming stainless-steel nozzle, offered up for inspection. If Sophie had not been fully convinced before, she was now. She politely declined the offer of free treatment.

The boiler still flagged, and, riddled with guilt, Sophie remained at a loss for what to do. In the past her husband would have dealt with the problem, but now it was left to her alone. In desperation she consulted the Yellow Pages where she found a local plumber named Martin Doughty. He had a modest but business-like advertisement which prompted Sophie to think his prices would be reasonable and that he might even do a good job into the bargain. On a dull day towards the end of February she made an appointment for him to visit.

Chapter Two

The weather was blustery and grey in the no man’s land between winter and spring. In the dark bedroom, Sophie lifted her head from the pillow and peered at the alarm clock through half-closed eyes. It was past eight. Nelson, the cat, was pestering to be fed and there would no peace till she complied. She jerked herself out of bed and followed his black-tipped tail the few steps from bedroom to kitchen. Prompted by incessant meowing, she hastily opened a can and scooped a dubious dollop into a bowl on the floor.

With a yawn, she dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, then opened the fridge for butter and milk. She picked up the teapot and was about to empty yesterday’s spent leaves into the bin under the sink when something odd caught her eye. She peered more closely at the rubbish and frowned: the Queen’s tight-lipped image was staring up at her from atop a confusion of discarded paper and potato peelings. Slowly it dawned on her that she was looking at a twenty-pound note – one of four. The previous day she had searched in despair for the cash, much needed rent from her lodger. Now here it was in the garbage. She must have accidentally thrown the money away herself. Shame and dismay seeped through her as she took in what this meant – how absent-minded she had become.

A recent tirade from Anya reverberated in her head, as she retrieved the soiled notes and carefully wiped them with a tea towel, spreading them out on the table to dry. In the past, Philip would have given her a hug and brushed the whole thing aside as a joke, but there was no laughter now. She buttered her two pieces of toast and poured boiling water into the brown pot, obscure in the morning gloom. Sophie had an atavistic aversion to switching on lights early in the day, despite the darkness of the north-facing kitchen. She flumped down on a chair and stared out towards the garden, pulling her black satin dressing-gown across her pale bosom, the threadbare embroidered dragon emblazoned on her back chafing against the wooden seat. She folded her goose-pimpled arms tight to her waist, as she listened to the sudden sound of hail falling briefly on the glass roof of the conservatory and a shiver ran through her as her eyes turned to the damp notes on the table.

She hurriedly ate her toast, then put two more slices into the slot, her shoulders hunched as much against guilt as the cold. The day before, she had weighed herself on the scales normally banished to the dusty space beneath the dresser. She could scarcely believe the reading and spent some time moving the machine from bedroom to kitchen and back in the vain hope that an unevenness of the floor was to blame. She solemnly vowed to eat less, but today appetite overruled her worthy plan. She had a full-time job teaching art at a girls’ school in the suburb of Enfield, a long way to travel each day, leaving her chronically tired and hungry. Sophie bolted the last of her breakfast and went off to get dressed. The boiler man was due to arrive at any moment and she began to panic. She knew she was useless in such situations – a typical middle-class woman forever held to ransom by ruthless workmen. But she also knew Anya would not accept any more delays.

Mr Doughty rang the doorbell just as Sophie was pulling up her second knee-high sock beneath her long skirt. Her body had always generated excessive static electricity, at times causing spectacular sparks, arcing to hair brushes and car door handles alike, so she avoided nylon. Like a wilful horse that refuses a bridle, she had long since stopped wearing tights, preferring her thighs bare and unrestricted beneath her clothes. Thrusting her feet into her shoes, she climbed the winding stair to the front door.

A diminutive, sallow man, no more than Sophie’s five feet six, stood in the porch. With gaze averted, he stepped into the hall and was soon trudging up to the first floor kitchen in Sophie’s wake.

‘Right, let’s see what’s wrong here,’ he muttered in a heavy Irish brogue.

Depositing a shabby canvas bag of tools on the floor, Mr Doughty took his time to examine the offending apparatus. Meanwhile, Sophie surreptitiously examined Mr Doughty: his hands were indelibly grubby and his dank, brown hair had shed a powdering of dandruff on the dark blue collar of his overalls, which were too large for his meagre frame.

Sophie hovered in the kitchen doorway but Doughty was suspicious of onlookers and made it clear he found her presence irksome. ‘Err . . . leave it with me for half an hour and I’ll take a look,’ he said morosely.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ said Sophie, as she turned to leave. Avoiding her eye, Doughty stared obliquely towards some nebulous point beyond her left elbow, his face pinched with an air of chronic depression. ‘Yes please, no sugar, thank you,’ came his monotonic reply.

Sophie went downstairs and filled the kettle, confidence draining from her in a slow leak. A short while later she returned to the first floor, cup in hand, then withdrew to await the diagnosis. But Mr Doughty was disconcertingly silent, so when more than thirty minutes had passed Sophie went back up. ‘How are we doing?’ she asked brightly.

‘It’s your diverter valve all right,’ said Doughty, as if announcing the death of a relative. ‘It’s not working, but I can’t do anything straight away. I’ll have to find out how much the new part will cost and come back to you.’

Sophie observed the yellow tinge in his eye and the oddly hairless nature of his skin.

‘So, you’re quite sure it’s the valve?’ she said, as they travelled back downstairs to the hall. She opened the front door.

‘Yes,’ came the unequivocal reply. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I can.’

Sophie watched as Mr Doughty walked over to his battered, white van. When he opened the driver’s door a small, scruffy dog rose shakily to its