No Lift and No Stairs Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

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  Harrison Road, Market Harborough,

  Leicestershire. LE16 7UL

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  Copyright © 2022 Ian Hey

  The right of Ian Hey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ISBN 9781915352484

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

  To Anna

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Acknowledgements

  One

  An Early Start

  I shot up in bed, sweating, heart pounding, the residue of a disturbing dream vanishing slowly from my consciousness.

  John Lennon was singing about cavities in a northern town, and I reached over and hit the ‘STOP’ button on the radio alarm. 5.30am, the skeletal, blue figures grinned at me.

  ‘I blew my lights out in a traffic car,’ I mumbled, and swung my barely awake carcass into an upright position on the side of the bed. Sarah always said this was one of my many annoying habits, me trying to sing the lyrics of a song and always getting them wrong.

  I sat on the loo trying to wipe out the sleep from my eyes. I did like The Beatles. OK, I’d only got the Red and Blue compilation albums of all their main hits, but they wrote good songs. I can’t abide all these trendy, so-called music lovers who say they were crap. They were massively influential and it wasn’t only the countless classics such as ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ but also the hidden gems that made them so great.

  I remembered getting off the bus on the Broadway when I still lived with Sarah and a busker sat outside Blockbusters playing a hauntingly beautiful song which I recognised but couldn’t quite place. When I got home, I began to hum the melody in the kitchen and Sarah came in and said, ‘I love that song’ – the first words she’d spoken to me in two days. I said to her I thought it was Donovan or Dylan. She tutted at my ignorance and corrected me: ‘“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by The Beatles, stupid.’

  I showered quickly and got changed, picked up a £20 note from the bedside table and walked outside into the November rain at twenty-five to six.

  The bus was on time and, yes, I did go upstairs but didn’t have a cigarette.

  Maurice Bagley sat in the Stoneways’ restroom in his usual seat at the table nearest the toilets: glasses on, perusing the Daily Mirror and sipping occasionally from a can of Tizer.

  I checked the clock on the wall above the 1974 Health and Safety Act and worked out I had three minutes to make and drink a coffee before the one-man wrecking ball which was Maurice Bagley sprang into life at six on the dot. I hurriedly flicked on the kettle in the kitchenette and grabbed an upside-down mug off the draining board. It wasn’t brilliantly clean, but it would have to do.

  We didn’t have coffee jars in our restroom, just a very large cash-and-carry tub which, give the boss his due, was always Nescafe. As soon as I’d pierced the lid off with a spoon from the drawer underneath the microwave, Maurice was by my side, bustling his short but solid frame about, flicking off the kettle and grabbing one side of the tub.

  I held the tub fast. ‘Maurice,’ I told him, ‘I’m having a cup of coffee before I do anything else, OK?’

  Maurice had hands like a bear. I was not to be undone and tightened my grip, but he was too strong and a great scree of coffee granules leapt out of the tub and landed on the lino floor just as Daz Oatridge, the operations manager, walked in through the office door.

  I’ll give Maurice his due: for a man who’d never been near a gymnasium in his entire life, he could certainly move fast. A muffled, ‘Morning,’ to Daz and he vanished through the restroom fire door to the yard like a Harry Potter character who’d just been vaporised by the ugly baddie’s wand.

  Daz allowed me a few slurps of very strong, black coffee while I hoovered up the mess. The reason for the 6am start, he explained, was because we had to be at a self-storage depot the other side of London by half eight.

  Maurice was putting his mobile phone back into his pocket as I climbed up into the passenger seat of STONE 42.

  ‘Daz has just phoned to tell me Unsworth’s running late,’ he said.

  I shrugged; I was still annoyed about the coffee incident.

  ‘We’ve got to pick him up at the station.’

  ‘Great,’ I muttered, and stared straight ahead.

  We drove out of the industrial estate in silence and turned left onto the London Road. There were no cars, just a lone figure in a bright, yellow hi-vis top and a flashing light strapped to his forehead, jogging along the pavement on the other side of the road towards us. For some reason, Maurice beeped him. It was an HGV truck’s horn and the jogger stumbled and nearly fell over. Maurice beeped him again, gave him a wave and chuckled. He looked at me, but I maintained a moody countenance.

  We parked in the bus stop opposite Fleet Town Station to wait for Jeff Unsworth and Maurice quickly became bored. Although he was nearing fifty-three, bundles of boundless, inquisitive energy infused his very being. Before long, he was fiddling with the sun visors and switching on the windscreen wipers, testing their three speeds and then switching them off again. He pressed a button on his armrest which opened and shut both his and my passenger window and then cranked his chair forwards and backwards before reclining himself almost horizontal.

  I continued to feign ignorance but did experience a moment of panic when Maurice righted himself, pulled out a fire extinguisher from beneath his driver’s seat and began to read the instructions.

  A thin straggle of bodies emerged through the as-yet-unmanned barriers in the station’s forecourt. 6.30am, second train heading for Waterloo and not a suit in sight. Half-asleep cleaners, shift workers and a removal man: could be the name of a song.

  Early morning, mid-afternoon or late at night, Jeff Unsworth always looked the same: gaunt, bedraggled and unshaven. However, a combination of failed relationships, a nomadic lifestyle and too many years working in the removal trade had bestowed upon Jeff a steely cynicism which enabled him to still w
alk across the stage of life. He flopped his Stoneways Removals bomber jacket over his head to ward off the rain and hurried over the road to the truck.

  I clambered onto the bunk behind and Jeff sat in the passenger seat. He closed the door and grunted a barely audible greeting, but that was Jeff’s way. Yes, he was late and it was his fault, but nobody was going to tell him that, not now at any rate, at such a stupidly early hour on a Friday morning. He wound down the passenger window, lit a cigarette and Maurice let him have it full blast with the fire extinguisher.

  I had to admit, I found it quite funny, but Jeff wasn’t happy, especially because his cigarette was now completely un-smokable. Luckily for him, the extinguisher was of the foam variety and he could wipe off most of the bubbles, except for some tiddlers, which stuck to his hair and ears.

  Maurice checked his mirrors and began to manoeuvre the truck out of the bus stop.

  Jeff was irate. ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’

  Maurice switched off the indicator and placed both hands on the steering wheel. ‘Mr Unsworth,’ he said, ‘are you familiar with the 1985 Fire and Safety Act?’

  ‘No, and neither are fucking you.’

  ‘Are you sure it was 1985?’ I asked.

  Maurice aimed a cursory glance back towards me and then pressed the button which opened the passenger window fully down. The top of the van hit the foliage of an overhanging tree and a solid sheet of water sprayed onto Jeff.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Maurice apologised. ‘Just checking you were fully out.’

  We reached the Purfleet roundabout and Maurice drove all the way round twice before I asked him what he was doing.

  Maurice spoke out loud as he drove. ‘Well, Mr Modern History expert, there’s a job sheet in here somewhere with an address and a map telling us where we’re going.’

  Jeff looked at me. ‘Well, I can’t read it. I left my bins at home.’

  I didn’t want to read the map. I’d dived into the bunk so I could try and have a kip.

  A car beeped us as Maurice began to drive around the roundabout for a third time.

  I was pissed off with Jeff but realised I had no choice; I’d have to navigate from the bunk.

  ‘Give it to me, then,’ I said to Jeff.

  ‘No, no,’ Maurice butted in. ‘One of you can hold the map up so I can see it and I’ll navigate while also driving this rather large vehicle.’

  The same car beeped us again as we completed our third circle. The driver pulled up level and downed his window.

  Maurice downed his and shouted across to make himself heard. ‘Don’t mess with me, sonny; I’m a member of the X-Men.’

  The driver gave us the finger and sped off back towards Fleet Town.

  ‘M25,’ I told Maurice.

  ‘Clockwise or anti-clockwise?’

  ‘Anti-clockwise,’ I told him. ‘We’re heading for the East End.’

  The address was: S&S’s Super Storage, Unit 3, Bernstein’s Industrial Park, The Old Kent Road . I worked out the easiest way was round the M25 and come off at Junction 2 where, at some point, the A2 itself, became Old Kent Road.

  I made a makeshift pillow out of my bomber jacket and told Jeff to wake me up when we reached Junction 2.

  It’s not the most pleasant bed, the bunk of STONE 42, but at least it was long enough for me to lie down on fully. The truck’s steady drone of governed, fifty-five miles an hour indicated to me we were on the M25 and I closed my eyes only to reopen them a minute later and stare at the top of the cab where several clumps of mould hung from the underlay of grey felt.

  According to a psychiatrist I used to chat to in the pub, one way of determining the state of a person’s mental health could be gauged by what golden bough they’d reached in life and how far they’d fallen off it. For example, when Ricky Hatton lost his one chance of boxing immortality after he got decked by Floyd Mayweather, he sank into a deep depression. OK, I hadn’t fallen as steeply as Hatton had, but being kicked out of Sarah’s flat and landing in the present humble hovel I was presently renting was definitely on a downward trajectory, so yes, I was feeling a little blue and those clumps of mould weren’t helping.

  I shifted onto my right side so my head was snuggled up behind Jeff’s seat. Just get on with it, I thought, and tried to think of happier things, but sadly, the chances of a tip and a few beers at the end of the day’s play seemed to be the only potential pleasures that came to mind. I rolled back over to my left and buried my head in my jacket.

  There was something I’d forgotten about Maurice – he seemed to know exactly what moment you were going to drift off and I’d never worked out how he did this.

  The early start finally caught up with me and I closed my eyes, my weary mind succumbing to the deliciousness of approaching sleep. Maurice beeped the horn and slammed on the brakes, forcing my head to bounce upwards and collide painfully with the mildewed roof of the cab.

  It had stopped raining when we pulled up outside the closed gates to Bernstein’s Industrial Park and the November dawn was full in the grey skies above the relentless concrete of the Old Kent Road. An Audi sports car sat on the other side of the gates directly opposite us and beeped its horn.

  It was funny with Maurice. He possessed an enviable vocabulary, but when irked, he was always a touch more direct. He leant his head out of the window and shouted, ‘Are you some kind of fucking idiot?’

  The car door opened and a well-dressed, dapper man emerged. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m Alan Curdley.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck who you are. Just get your silly little wanker’s car out of my fucking way.’

  There was a moment of almost perfect silence before I tapped Maurice on his shoulder and pointed out the name of the customer printed at the top of the worksheet. ‘ALAN CURDLEY’.

  Fortunately, dear old Alan either hadn’t actually heard what Maurice had said or just found it so ridiculous that its meaning had not yet fully computed in his head. He smiled. ‘Oh, come on, Mike; you must remember me?’

  ‘Mike?’ I echoed.

  ‘Shut up,’ Maurice hissed.

  ‘Is he someone who wants to kill you?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘I thought I’d wait for you here,’ Alan said, ‘so I could let you in and show you where to park the lorry.’

  ‘Ah, Alan,’ Maurice spoke out of the window again, ‘didn’t recognise you.’ He paused. ‘Have you lost some weight?’

  We backed Maurice in and stopped him a tail lift length away from the main shutters of Unit 4, headquarters of S&S’s Super Storage.

  Maurice got out of the cab and Alan formally greeted us all with a fleeting handshake.

  I’d have put him in his early fifties, of similar age to Maurice and Jeff, but he looked a hell of a lot better. He wore designer clothes and boasted a full crop of carefully manicured, grey-free, dark hair. One would call him handsome, although on closer inspection, his face appeared unusually tanned.

  ‘Sunbed overload,’ Jeff said.

  I heard the sound of a forklift levitating a heavy pallet off a vehicle somewhere on the estate and the opening riff of ‘Orgone Accumulator’ began to play in my head. Sarah says this is another of my most annoying traits: my love of Hawkwind.

  I must have been six or seven when I sat cross-legged on my mum’s lounge floor and watched grimy footage of Hawkwind playing ‘Silver Machine’ on a Top of the Pops repeat. The music meant nothing to me – it was their hair that fascinated me. It was the longest hair I’d ever seen and it wasn’t carefully corkscrewed nor painstakingly curled. It was long, unruly and greasy.

  The image stayed with me till I was thirteen when I found one of their LPs round Paranoid Ian’s house in his older brother’s bedroom. I nicked it and took it home. The music was incredibly repetitive and the songs went on forever, but they looked so damned cool on the inner sleeve I played the album again and aga
in until I finally began to like it and knew all the lyrics.

  The receptionist for S&S’s was a heavily made-up girl who looked like she’d machine-gunned herself several times with a staple gun. ‘JANE’, her nametag read.

  Alan introduced himself and she studied her computer. After a moment, eyes still glued to the screen, she asked Alan how he’d like to pay.

  Alan flashed an American Express card and placed it in the machine between Jane’s telephone and a brightly lit plastic contraption selling multicoloured gobstoppers.

  Jane blew out her bubblegum, exploded it and said, ‘You can take your card out now.’

  She authorised Alan a key for Lock-Up 6 and we followed him through a door marked ‘CUSTOMER STORAGE’.

  It wasn’t quite one of the tunnels on the spaceship in the first Alien film, where everything was dripping wet and scarily lit, but it certainly didn’t remind me of any of the self-storage units I’d ever been in.

  Alan stopped by a peeling wall where somebody had sprayed ‘I DID JANE OVER THE PHOTOCOPIER’ in fluorescent red and we all stopped. He turned to Maurice. ‘Guess what, Mike?’

  ‘Yes, Alan?’

  ‘Your chap at Stoneways – Darren Oatridge?’

  ‘Could well be.’

  ‘Do you know what he quoted me for two years’ storage?’

  It was a rhetorical question, so Maurice didn’t answer.

  ‘Seven thousand pounds!’ Alan announced dramatically. ‘Seven thousand pounds,’ he repeated in a lower tone, and whistled to himself at the ridiculousness of the figure. ‘Bill Scar, who co-owns this place with his son, Lee, quoted me two and a half thousand – four and a half less than Stoneways. To be quite frank, Mike, it’s a wonder your boss has any storage customers at all.’

  Maurice nodded his head in agreement and we all turned left down another poorly lit corridor. The rotten-apple smell of damp strengthened until we reached a rusting, metal door. LO K-U 6 was displayed in fading blue letters at the top and underneath somebody had written ‘THE BOSS IS A TWAT’ in indelible black marker pen.