There’ve been plenty of other, more convenient, moments for this particular memory to reappear. But no, as Declan walks into the lingering smell of his neighbour’s perfume it slithers stone-eyed from its corner. The door above has just banged and he is thinking how glad he is she couldn’t stay something about the smell and the dark and the faded echo of her heels freezes him. For a moment, Declan is a boy again. There’s another bang from a different front door. He clears his throat.
His wife is waiting upstairs. Her pearly pink and sticky lips will be pressed together as she keeps herself busy, waiting for him to report back. The girls are round at a friend’s. Susan sent them there as soon as the neighbour told her what she thought was going on downstairs. She’s worked herself up while waiting for him to get home from work. He’d been greeted by her voice, scaling upwards as she neared the end of each sentence, saying she thought they aught to call the police.
After speaking to the neighbour, Declan stopped for a minute to hold his wife and persuade her it was best if he went to investigate first.
But now he is here, the hairs on his arms lift and tremble. He doesn’t know the last time he came down to the bottom floor and it looks more rundown than he remembered. The wall lights have blown, or been tampered with, and the whole floor is alive with shadows. He squeezes his torch and starts to psyche himself up, thinking; this is my home. This is our home. We might be in a flat, but it’s still our home. Ours.
This way, he urges himself further into the dark. The damp fusty smell is stronger now and the perfume all but gone. The memory doesn’t recede though; if anything, he feels it draw closer as he steps downwards.
Declan holds onto the end of the banister and cranes his head to try and see into the nook under the stairs. It’s a gap of blue merging into black, a space where a tooth would have been. He stares into its centre. As he squints and leans forward, a lump in the darkness seems to detach itself and float towards the stairs and it feels as though he’s swaying on his feet, but only an instant later he can see there’s nothing moving. It was only a trick of the light, or lack of light, that made him think that pile of junk in the corner was coming for him.
Standing poised on the bottom step, tensed and swirling in eddies of adrenaline, he makes himself aware of his size, of the torch in his hand. He shouldn’t have allowed himself to feel so pathetic, but there is no ignoring the smell or the way it coils around him.

He remembers his tears, but not why he’d been so desperate to visit the reptile house in the first place. All he’d known was that it was the only thing he wanted in the world – and he couldn’t have it. It was already quite late by that point, they’d already seen the rhino and the tigers and he’d been happy.
But when he asked his mum, who was all swollen up with his baby brother and so very slow all the time, if they were going to look at the snakes yet, she didn’t stop fussing with the baby bag and said she’d see. He turned to his grandma, but his grandma was busy cooing at his grizzly little sister. They hadn’t even made it past the birdcages when his mum said she had to sit down, and he was forced to look at the parrots as this family settled on a bench.
If his dad had been with them, they would have gone to the reptile room first. Declan knew. He began to cry. Once he’d started, he hadn’t been able to stop. And once he’d been crying for a while, his little sister started too. His mum tried to point at the birds and his grandma kept telling him how lucky they all were to be spending a day at the zoo  but each time she said it up in the air, where he didn’t believe it.
His mum sighed and said his sister needed changed, they would have to find the bathroom. The tears made his face itchy but still they came and he let snot run into his mouth and down his chin. He cried until his head hurt. The toes of his shoes scuffed against the tarmac but his mum didn’t tell him to pick up his feet.
They stopped at the toilets and his grandma took his sister in. Declan stayed with his mum, still crying and asking why they never did anything he wanted to do. His mum leant over the handles of the empty buggy and said nothing. She only straightened up when his grandma and sister came back. Declan stamped his feet and sobbed.
Maybe they’d been going to take him to the reptile enclosure the whole time. He tries to put the zoo back together in his mind, but the pictures are all muddled up. Now the reptile room is at least twice as big and to the left of the monkey cages, but it can’t have been there thirty years ago.
He’d trailed along behind the buggy, and he was so very hot and so very tired. His mum and grandma has maybe spoken to him or maybe given up speaking to him. It hadn’t seemed important.

He lets go of the banister, listening out for noises from below or above, but hearing nothing. The light from the torch is pathetic. It’s got the same batteries in it that it had the five or six Christmases ago that he’d he unwrapped it. The honeyish circles grow and shrink as he aims into all the corners. There’s no one there, but his neighbour hasn’t been lying – someone definitely has been. He steps onto the basement floor, not aware that he is holding his breath.
The gap under the bottom stairs is big enough to fit maybe three people lying very closely together, if none of them moved. Behind him is the poky corridor and the stairs to the back garden he’s only seen once, when they first came to see the flat, and he knows he should go and check down there too, in case the lock has been obviously forced. Not yet though.
Declan doesn’t want to find out what is stashed under the stairs, he’d rather run back up them and drink his post-work beer and talk about the sad, far away things happening on the news. But now he’s here he must finish looking, and even though the blanket doesn’t look as though it’s big enough to cover anything but a child, he is finding it hard to bend over and lift it. He wishes he’d brought something down with him and casts an eye around the dusty leaves and scraps of paper littering the floor, looking for a stick or something similar. There’s nothing to help him.

He’d still been hiccupping and snivelling when his grandma dragged him into the reptile room. They stepped into the dark and it took Declan a while calm down. He was still thinking poor me, poor Declan. The lights were red and low and his grandma turned into a black tower above him. His legs were sore and by then he needed to pee very badly.
There weren’t any other people in the room, but there were plenty of little eyes looking. Declan and his grandma stood for what felt like a long time. He snorted back his snot and used his coat to wipe his face a bit. Eventually, he spotted the biggest glass enclosure and knew it must by the python’s. Looking at it, he remembered what it was he wanted to see so badly and pulled at his grandma’s hand. He pulled but was met with only an inch or so of give, and then nothing. The next thing he’d known, his grandma’s face was pressed close to his, but it was not soft and slack and half smiling like it normally was.
What’s this,” she’d hissed. “What is all this? Who do you think you are, behaving like this? With your mother about to drop on her feet, with that baby inside her and your little sister still in nappies. Here we are, trying to give you a nice day out, and all you can do is this.”
Declan was so shocked, he didn’t even squirm. He just stood and stared at her, this woman he’d always thought was his grandma. This woman who had always loved him.
How would you feel, if you tried to do something nice for someone and all they did was say they hated it and cry? How would you feel?” She continued. He was crying again by then, but he tried to do it quietly. “You wouldn’t like it, would you?” She said. He shook his head, scared to take his eyes away from hers in case she changed again. But all she did was stand up, her face disappearing into the gloom.
She took him to each of the glass enclosures and they’d stayed long enough for him to look inside, but he doesn’t know what he saw in any of them. He doesn’t even remember whether the python showed itself or not. He’d really needed the bathroom, and between the heat in his bladder and the coldness in his stomach, he could think of nothing else.
Finally, they stepped back out into the light. He wanted to let go of his grandma’s hand and run to his mum and be held, but he didn’t. The adults spoke and he stood beside his mum, who was smiling. Declan crossed his legs. She asked if he’d seen what he wanted and he nodded. One of her hands mussed his hair, and for a second he was sure he was about to piss himself.

Crouching under the stairwell, down amongst the source of the foosty smell, he feels something strange happening down around his diaphragm and hopes he isn’t going to be sick. He tightens the muscles in his throat and reaches out to take a corner, preparing himself to whip the blanket back.
He’s been expecting drink cans and dirty magazines, maybe even needles – his wife suspects needles – but all he finds is a small neat stack of National Geographics, a bundle of clothing and three cartons of orange juice. He stares, then lays the blanket back over them and switches off the torch.
He wishes he’d asked the neighbour about the age of the boy she’d said she’d seen. Skinny, she’d said, sort of squirrelly looking.  It didn’t look like enough stuff for more that one person. Not enough for one person really.
It’s been a long time since he’s thought about the afternoon in the reptile house, although it’s always been a secret, shameful memory, and one that used to come back to him far more often. It made him feel bad to think about it long before he’d been old enough to understand anything about the way his mum and grandma might have been feeling at the time. When his grandma died, and he’d sat at her funeral wearing a suit he’d bought himself, he thought of it again, and hoped that it wasn’t an afternoon she’d remembered as often as he had.
With his head warily lowered to avoid the sharp underside of the stairs, he starts to shuffle back out of the nook. He straightens up and strides to check the lock on the back door, which seems intact, and heads back up, unable to shake off the feeling that he has been intruding. He pauses half way up the flight to rub his hands on his jeans and think.
It would be a sad little existence under there. Even for a junkie, even for some scummy little schemie. Even for the kind of people who sometimes drove him to stand, clenching his fists, outside the doors of his children’s rooms. Wishing he could protect them from what was happening in the street and angry at a world that would expose them to noises like that. He shakes his head and continues, wishing he’d seen this boy for himself.
As he walks, he taps the torch against his thigh. The smell of the basement begins to thin and is replaced by new ones; incense from the student flat, a thick, warm curry from the Carlises, and he thinks there is a whiff of milk and the cake  Susan has been baking too. Sun shines through the skylight, and as he gets closer to his flat he has to shield his eyes.
His wife is waiting and she will need to be reassured. She will stand with her arms crossed, unable to relax until he has made it right. He’ll tell her there is nothing dangerous down there. But he won’t be able to lie; he’ll have to admit that someone has been there. He’ll try and reassure her, but he sees that they will have to call the council, or maybe even the police after all – although he’s not sure what they will tell them. Either way, he can see the boy will not be able to stay. His wife and the paranoid neighbour will not be the only people to think so.
He’ll kiss Susan if she lets him and remind her they just need to hold on a little longer. They won’t be in this flat forever; they’ll live in a house someday. A house where no one can make them feel bad for having what they want, where they won’t have to share, where he won’t have to go and look under the stairs like this. He nods.
When he gets in, he’ll call the authorities and go round to the Carlisles to tell Jim to watch out for some scrawny boy. Maybe they will go back down together and pack that stuff up. Put it in carrier bags or something. And then he’ll write a note to stick on the back of the front door, telling everyone to make sure it’s closed properly at all times, and then they will wait.