The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    â€˜No, together!’ He leapt onto the first step, sending Hadrian bounding ahead in a fit of joy; then after scaling a few more, he ran back down to her.
    â€˜Come on – show me how fit you are!’
    Siân was sick with embarrassment, dumbstruck by his rudeness. If he noticed her distress, it only spurred him on.
    â€˜Come on – slim young woman like you,’ he panted, ‘should be able to run up a few stairs.’
    â€˜Please, Mack …’ His flattery was crueller than insults. ‘Don’t do this.’
    â€˜It’s all about pacing yourself,’ he persisted, his face flame-red now, suggesting he was ashamed, but had gone too far to retreat now. ‘You take a breath … every three stairs … sixty-six breaths …’
    â€˜Mack,’ she said. ‘I’m an amputee.’
    For a moment he paced on, then abruptly stopped.
    â€˜Christ,’ he said, his fists dangling loose at his sides. ‘I’m sorry.’
    Hadrian had scampered down to join them again, bearing no grudge for the way they’d teased him. He looked up at Siân and his master’s faces, back and forth, as if to say, What next?
    Mack wiped his huge palm across his face, then did a more thorough job with the hem of his T-shirt. A little boy finding a pretext for hiding his face from an angry parent. A beautiful young man baring his abdomen, muscled like a Greek statue.
    You bastard , thought Siân. I want, I want, I want.
    â€˜Which leg?’ asked Mack, when he’d recovered himself.
    She lifted her left leg, wiggled it in the air for as long as she could keep her balance.
    â€˜It’s a good prosthesis,’ he said, adopting his best physicianly tone.
    â€˜No it’s not ,’ she retorted irritably. ‘It’s a Russian job, mostly wood. Weighs a ton.’
    â€˜You haven’t considered upgrading to a plastic one? They’re really light, and nowadays—’
    â€˜Magnus,’ she warned him, caught between bewildered laughter and bitter fury, ‘it’s none of your business.’
    To her relief, he dropped the subject, swallowing hard on his no doubt encyclopaedic knowledge of artificial limbs – if ‘encyclopaedic’ was the correct word for a professional acquaintance with the glossy promotional brochures that prosthetics companies sent to doctors.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding genuinely chastened. Hadrian, impatient for action, fidgeted between them, his downy black forehead wrinkled in supplication. Siân stroked him, and it felt good, so she knelt down and stroked him some more.
    Mack knelt too, and since her hand was busy with the head and mane, he stroked the flank, hoping she wouldn’t pull away.
    â€˜How did you lose your leg?’ he said gently, not like a doctor quizzing a patient, but like an average person humbled by curiosity to know the gory details.
    Siân sighed, not angry with him anymore, but struck by how absurdly inappropriate the verb ‘lose’ was in this context, how coy and, at the same time, judgemental. As if she had absentmindedly left her leg on a bus, and it was still lying unclaimed in a lost property office somewhere. As if, when the pain inside her was ready for the kill, she would ‘lose’ her life like an umbrella.
    â€˜I lost it in Bosnia,’ she said.
    He was instantly impressed. ‘In the war?’ he suggested. She knew he was picturing her doing something exotically heroic, like pulling wounded children out of burning wreckage, and being blown up by an enemy shell.
    â€˜Yes, but it had nothing to do with the war, really,’ she said. ‘I was there because my boyfriend was a journalist. And we were stepping out of a bar in Gorazde when a car knocked me down, right there on the footpath. It was a drunk teenager behind the wheel.’ She frowned irritably at Mack’s look of disbelief. ‘They have drunk