Read Online Plender by Ted Lewis - Free Book Online

much at all. She’d had more to drink than she’d thought she’d had and her brain was trying to take in what had happened after the formality of the catalogue shots. Not that she’d minded very much but some of the shots I’d taken once we’d stopped pretending and started doing just that must have struck her as being at least original. But now my present coldness was causing her to have second thoughts about her willingness. Dumbly she pulled her coat round her shoulders as I opened the studio door to get us out and I remembered that earlier I’d helped her off with it as proof that I was a gentleman. Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought as she went by me, just let me get her home and that’ll be an end of it. Except for the pictures. But then when I developed them they wouldn’t seem real. That wouldn’t be a real girl in the prints, somebody I’d known and made love to. She’d be someone I’d dreamed up, unreal, a fantasy for masturbation.
    I closed the door behind me and looked at Eileen. She was standing near the single rail of wood that acted as a banister, her foot on the top step, her back to the staircase. She was looking down at her toes, her face all still, silent and regretful. I wanted to say something to make her feel better but to do that would have required more effort than I was capable of, so I said nothing at all and began to turn back towards the door so that I could lock it. But as I moved, Eileen moved at exactly the same moment, reaching out for me, for some kind of comfort. And seeing what was coming I completed my turn more abruptly than I’d intended, to avoid her gesture by pretending not to have seen it. But in her hurry to touch me before I turned, her foot slipped off the top step and she lurched towards me, falling against me just as I reached the end of my turn, as I pushed the key into the lock. The thrusting movement of my shoulder caught her in the chest. She spun round and was forced to begin trotting down the top few steps as the momentum carried her downwards.
    She would have been quite all right if she hadn’t reached out and tried to stop herself by hanging on to the banister rail with both hands. But when she did that her upper body was jerked to an abrupt halt while her legs shot out in front of her and instead of landing on the stairs they swung out into the space of the stairwell so that she was left dangling in the blackness of the stairwell, her fingers locked together round the banister. For a moment I couldn’t move. Then, slowly, as if any speed might cause her fingers to slip apart, I began to walk down the stairs to help her.
    Her coat miraculously was still clinging to her shoulders. As I drew close to her it slipped off her and half of it lay on the edge of the staircase, the other hanging in the empty space. I stared, fascinated, at the slow movement as the weight of the lower half dragged all of the coat over the edge and away out of sight. A moment later there was a soft slap as the coat hit the paved floor below. It was then, exactly as the coat made the sound, that Eileen’s fingers parted and slipped from round the banister. She didn’t make a sound. One second she was there, the next she was on her way down to her death.
    I heard her hit and I screamed.
    Then I sat down abruptly and still with my mouth open but now unable to scream I stared at the space where Eileen had been. My brain seemed to be paralysed. It refused to put any thoughts in motion, as if by freezing, it denied what had happened. If I sat there long enough, just staring, perhaps forever, then everything would be all right. Everything would become normal again. I would take Eileen home and drive back to my wife and kids and tomorrow would be Sunday and everything would be fine.
    I sat there a long time trying to pretend it hadn’t happened but it was no use. At the bottom of the stairs there was a dead seventeen-year-old girl and I’d been taking pornographic pictures of her and when