The Staircase

Two men with different destinies.

 

 

THE STAIRCASE

 

The large door to the even larger house was open. Pasco pushed it wider open and looked around him. He needed to escape from Jason, who had been following him, and who it seemed wanted to give him a small packet. Everything was in dimness, the only light in the hall was that which came from a stained glass window which was on the right hand wall, halfway up the impeccably kept wooden staircase. From where Pasco was standing, the story told in the stained glass was impossible to see, the only thing visible was that of a rainbow of colours which spilt itself over the stairs and the floor. Pasco took a step forward out of curiosity and then he heard that Jason had entered behind him. The only way out of the situation was up. Pasco ran towards the stairs and climbed them as fast as he could. It wasn’t easy, the steps were deep. Jason was closing in on him, the packet still in his hand, and Pasco was doing his best to stay ahead. Pasco ran past the stained glass window and was on the second flight of stairs, when out of the corner of his eye he saw Jason’s outstretched hand with the packet in it, held out for Pasco to take, who got frightened and continued running up the stairs.  The small packet that had been in Jason’s hand, fell over the banister and fell down to the hall floor. Pasco ran on and up until he reached the top floor. He turned round, Jason wasn’t there, he had gone back downstairs. Pasco sat down with his feet resting on the top stair. He wondered what had really happened, and why Jason had not bothered to catch up with him.

 

As a small boy, Pasco had been interested in music programmes on the radio. He was very attentive to the radio that his mother always had on when she was at home. His father listened to football, boxing, and cricket matches. The news was, of course, de rigueur and there was total silence when the family was daily informed of what was happening in the world outside, however far away it was. Somehow that news had to be listened to with as much attention paid to it as if it were going on around the corner. As soon as his father was out of sight, that is at a football match or at the pub, Pasco’s mother, Moira, changed wavebands and music poured forth. That was what Pasco loved most about the radio, the way the sound could be changed at the turn of a dial. As he grew into adolescence, Pasco became more determined than ever to work on the radio. He got his ideas of clothes from his mother’s magazines, and wore copies of sweaters that he saw radio announcers wear in the photographs in interviews. He adopted a casual and what he considered to be a sophisticated appearance.

 

His beginnings as a radio disc jockey were not without mishap. Pasco informed all his school friends that he was setting up a radio station from his bedroom. Everyone he knew listened in to his rather odd sounding records. The system that he set up was worse than primitive and so were his records. Bit by bit he managed to get some records of the most popular music, which upgraded his station. The police were asked to call round to his home on several occasions to inform him that there had been complaints about the noise emanating from his bedroom. When he paid no attention the police then requested he close it down. The silence in Pasco’s bedroom never lasted long. He’d look for and eventually find another waveband to broadcast on. Some of his mates wanted to get in on the act and set up their own pirate stations. Pasco was serious, he really did want to broadcast for the rest of his life. Girls thought he was the best boy to go out with. Bad luck for them. Pasco’s head was full of ideas of how to get on in radio, and girls didn’t come into them.

 

One day Pasco asked the head master at his school if he could run a radio station there at lunchtime. For the first time since he had begun broadcasting he had to accept having a companion in the studio, also it had to be a girl, as they were also members of the same school. Pasco was on the point of turning it all down and stay with his own home pirate station, but then he thought that if he did that, it would mean that he had lost out on an opportunity.

The girl who was to accompany him was called Jill. She came with preconceived ideas, which Pasco ignored. She was also supposed to be given air time, which was anathema to him. Jill’s idea of broadcasting was to speak about girlie things, and Pasco’s was to broadcast music. The headmaster thought that there was room for all kinds of ideas, but Pasco didn’t agree at all. He had started out as a disc jockey and that was how he meant to stay for the time he was at school. Pasco refused to have an argument with Jill about the way she operated on the school radio, and let her have her own way. The music side of the station became smaller and smaller and other items took over: who was dating who, and news about hair and make up. All in all Pasco’s ideas disappeared. His mates complained, and he said nothing of his plans. By the time he had left school, the radio station was nothing but full of silly things without any serious music being played.

 

For the first years after school, Pasco moved in and out of a twilight world where he met disc jockeys and singers and bands. The monotony of everyday life with its commitments wasn’t for Pasco. He saw his own life as being a long succession of music sessions and news items on radio and television for those who were at home or at work. His mother used to ask him about signing on at the labour exchange or get benefits. Pasco turned a deaf ear to her pleadings, and said nothing about his ambitions and desires.

 

It was during that time he met Jason, who was a rather shady character but was interesting to Pasco because he ran a radio station from an empty warehouse. The ownership of the warehouse never arose, it was empty and Jason said no problem, and so there were no problems between the two young men.

Jason saw the potential in Pasco and decided to use it to his and Pasco’s advantage. Jason was a good disc jockey, but Pasco was a natural. There was a natural rapport between Pasco and his public that Jason, for all his sophistication, didn’t have. Also Jason was a few years older than Pasco.

 

As time passed, Pasco and his radio station enjoyed a terrific success. Many strange things happened in the years when Pasco was becoming well-known and Jason wrote the news items. There were robberies, burglaries, scandals of bribes, and extortions. When Pasco was handed the items to be read out on the radio, it was as if Jason had been there on the spot, they were so fresh. No other radio station had the news so hot, as if it had been recently removed from an oven. Pasco sometimes raised his eyebrows but said nothing, his attitude at that point was to keep building up his career.

 

Pasco’s popularity soon transcended to the most famous radio stations and he was approached by a man from one of them. Pasco was offered a job in a large radio and television company, which he accepted. That was the parting of the ways between Jason and Pasco, and there was no more news of crimes in the area.

 

Pasco moved away to be nearer his new job. The following years saw Pasco rise to a great popularity nationwide, and he became a household name.

 

One day, when his stint for the day was finishing, the police arrived at the radio and television station to inform that they wanted to speak to Pasco about a burglary. He was kept at the police station for several hours, during which he protested his innocence as if to a brick wall. No one believed him.

Jason rang him after seeing Pasco’s name in the newspapers, and told him to meet him at the big house that they had visited many times when they were working in the warehouse. It was a place for fantasising in, and they had made up stories about the pictures in the stained glass window. They had both wanted to live in the house, but it was an impossibility.

 

After Pasco had run out of the large house, he hid in his mother’s house for the time needed to get everything in order to escape for good. The most important thing was to make sure that he would be able to maintain himself for a very long time before he found something else to do where he could make money. He placed his savings in an off-shore bank account. His face being famous, Pasco grew a beard and dyed his hair much darker than it really was, he dressed in dark sports clothes, and thus made himself anonymous-looking. Being wanted by the police for something he didn’t do was not very appealing to Pasco, who had come to the conclusion that the forces of law and order would never believe that he couldn’t have committed a burglary on that night as he had been in the studios.

 

The train took Pasco as far as Edinburgh, and then he had to find alternative forms of how to travel to the isolated Scottish island where he would spend the next years, or even the rest of his life if necessary. As far as he knew, no one knew his whereabouts and he would only inform his mother when he was assured that she wouldn’t give him away. Pasco went to stay in a small inn-cum-pub, and when an empty crofter’s cottage became free, he moved into it. Waking up in the mornings without the pressure of having to get up and go into the radio station or send out music from his bedroom as he had been doing since he was a teenager, was the best thing that had happened to Pasco. He had always enjoyed the tension and work load, plus the sense of competition his job had entailed, but he had never realised how overworked he had been. Now, not only was he in the police’s eyes a delinquent, but a has-been disc jockey.

 

Step by step Pasco changed one life style for another, now he was a listener where he had been an entertainer. Gradually he rejected the radio and the television and went back to books and painting pictures. He spent very little money on clothes as he was not in a place where fashion mattered.

 

Many years passed, and Pasco had white in his beard and his hair, when his mother rang him one day to say that the large house had been sold after having been on the market for ages. Pasco got his beard and hair trimmed and told his new friends and neighbours that he had to go back home to sort some things out. They told him that they would look after the cottage for him.

 

Pasco entered his mother’s house and saw it as he had always seen it in his memory when thinking about her and his youth and his beginnings on the radio. He asked his mother whether the police had ever returned, but she said just a couple of times at the beginning, and that no one had been arrested for the burglary. It was still an unsolved crime.

 

Pasco went to see the large house, and saw that it had been turned into an hotel. The large front door was standing open and he was able to see right inside the reception hall, and the staircase he had run up escaping from Jason and had run past the stained glass window. The receptionist asked him if he wanted anything, but he simply smiled at her and walked out.

His head was full of thoughts of the last time he had been there with Jason. He had the idea that it might not be a bad thing to try and look him up. After all, the police had never gone looking for him up in Scotland, so perhaps he was no longer a person of interest to them.

 

Pasco had an old phone number for Jason and rang it. The person at the other end, who was Jason’s mother, told him that her son was dead, that he had died from cancer the previous year. She told Pasco that he was to visit her house, as Jason had left him something. Pasco accepted her offer of the visit and wondered what Jason could have left him.

 

Jason’s mother lived in a rather nice house in a small town some way away from where Pasco’s mother lived. That fact was a relief to Pasco. Jason’s mother opened the front door and invited him into the front room, where she served him tea and a slice of fruit cake. After the niceties had been paid, Jason’s mother gave Pasco a box of Jason’s possessions. In spite of his curiosity, Pasco preferred to peruse the interior of the box in the safety of his own bedroom. He asked Jason’s mother whether or not he had suffered much from the cancer. She told him that Jason’s health had gone downhill slowly at first, and then as it got nearer the end the decline had been more rapid till he had eventually faded away.

 

Alone in his old bedroom and with his mother downstairs watching television, Pasco opened the box and spread the contents onto the top of his bed. The first thing his eyes alighted on was the packet that Jason had dropped over the banister all those years ago. Pasco opened the packet and saw two things: a letter and two photographs. The letter told how it was he, Jason, who had carried out the burglary that night, and two snapshots of the television screen, with date and time, taken by one of the gang, of Pasco working that same night which proved his innocence. The letter also explained that the other robberies and crimes had been committed by Jason and a small gang that ,he had been a member of. Jason had been a delinquent before meeting Pasco and when he became aware that Pasco would be a far better disc jockey than him, then he had decided to make Pasco famous and he, Jason, would be a kind of manager to him. Pasco’s next posting on the radio television channel when he had run away to Scotland, was to have been a disc jockey and chat show host.

 

The chase up the staircase had been because Jason had wanted to give Pasco the photos, which proved that what he had told the police was the truth. Jason had never been suspected. The reason things hadn’t worked out as Jason had planned, was because Pasco had misunderstood Jason’s intentions.

 

So, Pasco had run away when there had actually been no need. Or had there? One thing for sure, when Pasco went back to the island and the crofter’s cottage, he took his mother with him.