The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read Online Free PDF Page A

West Cliff. ‘Sun-dome with facial and leg boosters’ it said, and to Siân this seemed like the most heartbreakingly sad phrase she’d ever read this side of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
    Get a grip , she counselled herself, and laid the paper aside. She noticed that someone had joined her on the bench: an obese, spiky-haired punkette, an unusual sight in Whitby – almost as unusual as a monk. Siân goggled just a few seconds too long at the infestation of silver piercings on the girl’s brow, nose and ears, and was given a warning scowl in return. Chastened, she looked down. At the punkette’s feet sat a dog, to help the girl beg perhaps. Apart from the pictogram for ‘anarchy’ doodled on his wheat-coloured flank in black felt-tip, he was a very ordinary-looking dog, a Labrador maybe – nowhere near as beautiful as Hadrian.
    Face it: compared to Hadrian, every other dog was plain.
    At ten to eight, Siân began to climb the hundred and ninety-nine steps and, gazing for a moment across the harbour, she suddenly spotted Hadrian and Magnus on the other side, two tiny figures sprinting along Marine Parade. Her melancholy turned at once to a sort of indignant excitement. Why would they choose there to run instead of here on her side? They must be avoiding her! Surely nobody could prefer the stink of raw fish and the pierside’s dismal panorama of amusement parlours and pubs to what lay at the foot of the church steps …
    Her sudden, fervid impulse to jump up and down and wave to Mack, despite the fact that there was no chance of him noticing, alarmed her – clearly, she was farther gone than she’d thought, and should make an immediate start on restoring her sanity before it was too late.
    I am here , she reminded herself, to work. I am not here to be torn apart. I am not here to be treated like dirt.
    She imagined her emotions embodied in the form of a hysterical novice nun, and her judgement as the wise and kindly abbess, counselling restraint. She visualised the bare interior of one of Saint Hilda’s prayer-cells lit up gold and amber with sunbeams, a merciful ebbing away of confusion, a soul at peace.
    * * *
    When Siân reached the burial site, Pru was already lifting off the blue tarpaulins, exposing the damp soil. Towards the edges of the excavation, the clay was somewhat soggier than it needed to be, having absorbed some rainfall over the weekend in addition to its ritual hosing last thing Friday afternoon. Siân was glad her appointed rectangle was towards the middle of the quarter acre. All right, maybe Saint Hilda wouldn’t have approved of her desire to keep her knees dry at the expense of her fellow toilers, but the sheath of Tubigrip under her tights lost some of its elastic every time she washed it, so she’d rather it stayed clean, thank you very much.
    â€˜Sleep well?’ asked Pru, rolling up another tarpaulin, exposing Siân’s own appointed shallow grave.
    â€˜No, not really,’ said Siân.
    â€˜Lemme guess – you stayed up to watch that movie about the robbery that goes wrong. The one with … oh, what’s-her-name?’ Regurgitation of facts was not Pru’s forte . ‘The one who’s gained so much weight recently.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue,’ said Siân.
    Jeff was next to arrive, a wizened old hippy who seemed to have been on every significant dig in Britain since the war. Then Keira and Trevor, a husband-and-wife team who were due to lay down their trowels and mattocks tomorrow and flee to the warmer and better-paid climes of a National Geographic dig in the Middle East. Who would replace them? Very nice people, according to Nina, the supervisor. Coming all the way from north Wales.
    By ten past, everyone was on site and working, distributed like medieval potato harvesters over the sub-divided ground. Fourteen living bodies, scratching in the ground for the subtle