The Complete Short Stories

Ward, at least, had a certain degree of privacy. Two months earlier, before he came to live on the staircase, he had shared a room with seven others on the ground floor of a house in 755th Street, and the ceaseless press of people jostling past the window had reduced him to a state of exhaustion. The street was always full, an endless clamour of voices and shuffling feet. By 6.30, when he woke, hurrying to take his place in the bathroom queue, the crowds already jammed it from sidewalk to sidewalk, the din punctuated every half minute by the roar of the elevated trains running over the shops on the opposite side of the road. As soon as he saw the advertisement describing the staircase cubicle he had left (like everyone else, he spent most of his spare time scanning the classifieds in the newspapers, moving his lodgings an average of once every two months) despite the higher rental. A cubicle on a staircase would almost certainly be on its own.

However, this had its drawbacks. Most evenings his friends from the library would call in, eager to rest their elbows after the bruising crush of the public reading room. The cubicle was slightly more than four and a half square metres in floor area, half a square metre over the statutory maximum for a single person, the carpenters having taken advantage, illegally, of a recess beside a nearby chimney breast. Consequently Ward had been able to fit a small straight-backed chair into the interval between the bed and the door, so that only one person at a time needed to sit on the bed — in most single cubicles host and guest had to sit side by side on the 267 bed, conversing over their shoulders and changing places periodically to avoid neck-strain.

‘You were lucky to find this place,’ Rossiter, the most regular visitor, never tired of telling him. He reclined back on the bed, gesturing at the cubicle. ‘It’s enormous, the perspectives really zoom. I’d be surprised if you haven’t got at least five metres here, perhaps six.’

Ward shook his head categorically. Rossiter was his closest friend, but the quest for living space had forged powerful reflexes. ‘Just over four and a half, I’ve measured it carefully. There’s no doubt about it.’

Rossiter lifted one eyebrow. ‘I’m amazed. It must be the ceiling then.’

Manipulating the ceiling was a favourite trick of unscrupulous landlords — most assessments of area were made upon the ceiling, out of convenience, and by tilting back the plywood partitions the rated area of a cubicle could be either increased, for the benefit of a prospective tenant (many married couples were thus bamboozled into taking a single cubicle), or decreased temporarily on the visits of the housing inspectors. Ceilings were criss-crossed with pencil marks staking out the rival claims of tenants on opposite sides of a party wall. Someone timid of his rights could be literally squeezed out of existence — in fact, the advertisement ‘quiet clientele’ was usually a tacit invitation to this sort of piracy.

‘The wall does tilt a little,’ Ward admitted. ‘Actually, it’s about four degrees out — I used a plumb-line. But there’s still plenty of room on the stairs for people to get by.’

Rossiter grinned. ‘Of course, John. I’m just envious, that’s all. My room is driving me crazy.’ Like everyone, he used the term ‘room’ to describe his tiny cubicle, a hangover from the days fifty years earlier when people had indeed lived one to a room, sometimes, unbelievably, one to an apartment or house. The microfilms in the architecture catalogues at the library showed scenes of museums, concert halls and other public buildings in what appeared to be everyday settings, often virtually empty, two or three people wandering down an enormous gallery or staircase. Traffic moved freely along the centre of streets, and in the quieter districts sections of sidewalk would be deserted for fifty yards or more.

Now, of course, the older buildings had been torn down and replaced by housing batteries, or converted into apartment blocks. The great banqueting room in the former City Hall had been split horizontally into four decks, each of these cut up into hundreds of cubicles.