The Thirteenth Floor

by Alyson Hilbourne

‘One, two, three…’ Billy’s first words were numbers.

We counted the floors as the lift went down.

‘Twenty-six, twenty-five… fourteen and twelve…’

And up again.

‘One, two, three…’

It was when he could read the numbers himself that Billy noticed floor thirteen was missing.

‘Where is it?’ he demanded, looking round as if it had somehow been concealed in the small space of the lift.

‘Thirteen is unlucky. They don’t put in a thirteenth floor, chuck,’ Mam explained.

‘How can there not be a thirteen? How does fourteen stay up?’ Billy asked with childish logic. ‘There must be a thirteen.’

The missing floor niggled at Billy. Each time we used the lift he asked after it. One day he tried pushing the stop on the lift between floor twelve and fourteen. All he succeeded in doing was halting the lift. We were stuck in it for two hours. Mam was late for work and not best pleased, and nor were the people who had to climb the stairs.

When he was old enough to go out on his own, Billy set off to look for floor thirteen. While the other kids were kicking a football about on the scruffy concrete below or learning to sniff glue in the stairwells, Billy searched.

‘You’re disturbing the baby.’ The woman on the twelfth floor shooed Billy away as he hung over the railings looking up from her corridor.

‘Go away, kid. This isn’t the playground,’ the man on the fourteenth floor shouted at him, his voice booming off the concrete walls.

Billy searched the stairwell for signs of the thirteenth floor. He braved the stink of urine and the bags of rubbish, tapping on walls, peering into dark corners and opening doors.

‘I’ve found it, Jeanie,’ he whispered to me one day when I came in from school. ‘Don’t tell Mam!’ His eyes were bright and his movements were twitchy and nervous.

‘Found what?’ I peered at him. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Floor thirteen!’

I frowned and shook my head.

‘There’s no such thing, Billy.’

‘There is. It’s a great place. Everyone lives in big flats with no broken windows or leaks in the ceilings. The people have huge TVs and a bedroom each. There’s bowls of chocolates on the tables and they eat Christmas lunch everyday and play games together. It’s a fantastic place, Jeanie.’

I gave him a sideways look. It sounded suspiciously like this place was a mix of his favourite things and I didn’t believe a word of it. He was making it up.

Billy’s school rang Mam. They were worried. They said he was unsettled and unfocused. Work wasn’t finished and he was falling behind. He wasn’t interested in learning.

‘And he doesn’t have any friends,’ the Headmistress told Mam. ‘He doesn’t play with the other children at break and he can’t work cooperatively in class. We’re thinking of referring him for an assessment.’

‘It’s your job to keep him interested,’ Mam told her. ‘My Billy’s all right. Must be something wrong with your school.’ She wouldn’t hear a word against him. He was always her favourite.

‘Pah, teachers,’ she said to me after she’d put the phone down. ‘They want everything on a plate. They don’t worry I’ve got to work all the hours God sends just to keep a roof over our heads,’ and with that she swept up her overalls and went off to clean the office block behind the DIY shop.

Billy didn’t come home that night.

‘Where’s he gone now?’ Mam asked when she got in. ‘Jeanie, go and look in the stairwells.’ She knew where Billy hung out.

But he wasn’t there. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I asked the kids playing football.

‘Nah. What would we want with that weirdo?’ they said.

I checked under the stairs where the empty spray cans and glue bottles collected.

Mam called the police. They borrowed a photo of Billy and knocked on the doors of all the flats.

‘Yeah. That kid’s always hanging around here,’ the man on the fourteenth floor said. The police took him down to the station for further questioning but they had to let him go.

I made us tea. Mam couldn’t do anything. She sat on the sofa staring into space, eyes red and puffy.

‘Where is he, Jeanie? Where can he be?’

She couldn’t sleep. I heard her pacing around as night after night she waited for Billy to come home. During the day she took to haunting the stairwells looking for him, peering in dark corners as if the police might have missed something. She refused to go to work in case she wasn’t in when he came home. She lost weight and stopped taking care of herself until her hair was lank and her eyes sunken.

She didn’t believe me when I told her that Billy had found the thirteenth floor.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘There’s no such thing.’

The housing association has offered to re-house us but Mam won’t leave.

‘How would Billy find us if we’ve gone?’

So we stay in the flat and I go up and down and up and down in the lift counting the floors for old time’s sake.

But between the twelfth and fourteenth floor, I hold my breath and sometimes I think I can hear Billy’s voice.

‘My turn,’ he shouts and there’s the sound of a dice shaken in a tumbler or maybe it’s just the lift chain rattling. Then a waft of roasted turkey and crispy potatoes makes my mouth water and I hope Billy is safe and happy wherever he is.