The bang from the landing is not loud enough to be catastrophic, but it is deliberate. It has shape. It lands in the quiet of the house like punctuation at the end of a sentence I didn’t know I was writing.
I pause the film mid-scene, Kate Hudson frozen in glossy indignation, and the sudden absence of sound makes the house feel cavernous. Laura is on nights. I am certain she is on nights. I replay the memory of her leaving: her hair tied back, travel mug in hand, the familiar scrape of the front door closing behind her. The house had settled after that. It had exhaled.
Now it feels like it is holding its breath.
I stay beneath the duvet for longer than I want to admit, listening with the intensity of prey. The boiler ticks. A pipe sighs somewhere in the walls. Wood contracts against the cold. Ordinary sounds, but they feel newly sinister, as if they are rehearsing for something larger. My heart beats hard enough that I wonder if that was the bang I heard – my own body misfiring in the dark.
When nothing follows, the silence begins to feel intentional.
I slide my feet out from under the duvet and lower them cautiously towards the floor. The wood is winter-cold and the shock of it jolts up through my spine. For a moment I hover there, suspended between childish instinct to retreat, to hide, and adult reasoning. It’s the wind, I tell myself. The sash window on the landing never seals properly. The latch slips when the temperature drops.
Still, I reach for my slippers before I stand.
‘Laura?’ My voice travels strangely in the dark, thinner than usual, as though the house has absorbed part of it.
No reply.
I open my bedroom door slowly. It complains on its hinges, a long, low creak that makes the hairs at the nape of my neck stand upright. The landing is unlit, the staircase below submerged in shadow. There is a density to the darkness that feels almost material.
‘Hello?’ I try again, softer now.
There is a smell I can’t quite place, not unfamiliar, just displaced, like the air has been disturbed and hasn’t yet resettled. I step out onto the landing and move towards the top of the stairs, peering down into the lower hallway. It is an ordinary view: the coat hooks, the small table with the bowl of keys. But ordinary things, seen in the dark, lose their loyalty.
I reach behind me for the light switch.
The force against my back is sudden and unequivocal.
There is no ambiguity in it. No stumble. No accidental brush.
A push.
The world tilts violently forward. My hands grasp for the banister but close around nothing. The first impact steals my breath; the second fractures it. My body becomes a series of collisions. Wood against bone. Bone against wood. Each step a punctuation mark in a sentence written by gravity. There is no time to scream. Only the sickening awareness of momentum.
When I land at the bottom, I am aware first of stillness. Then of pain, blooming fast and bright.
At the top of the stairs stands a figure, reduced by darkness to an outline. Watching.
The image burns into me before the blackness takes everything else.
Light returns as an assault.
It drills into my closed eyelids, forcing its way through until my skull feels hollowed out by brightness. The ceiling moves above me in a slow procession of grey tiles and fluorescent strips, the geometry of hospital infrastructure. I try to turn my head away from the glare and discover that I cannot.
Panic arrives whole and immediate.
‘Stay still, lovey,’ a voice murmurs near my ear. It is soft but practised, a tone shaped by repetition. ‘You’ve got a neck brace on.’
Neck brace.
The words settle with a delay, like aftershocks.
I attempt to swallow. My throat feels scraped raw. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re in hospital. You’ve had an accident.’
Accident. The word feels carefully chosen. Neutral. Sanitised.
Memory returns in fragments: the landing, the stretch of darkness, the pressure between my shoulder blades. The silhouette at the top of the stairs.
‘I was pushed,’ I hear myself say, though my voice sounds distant, as though someone else is testing it.
There is a pause I am not meant to notice.
When I wake properly, the movement has stopped. The ceiling above me is static now, painted a diluted blue that is meant to be calming. A smoke detector sits slightly off-centre, its small red light blinking at steady intervals.
On. Off.
On. Off.
The rhythm steadies something inside me. I begin to count, as I used to as a child during thunderstorms, measuring distance between lightning and thunder, translating fear into arithmetic.
At seventy-two, a new voice enters my field of hearing.
‘Hi, Alexis. I’m Doctor Dodson.’
Her tone is composed, efficient without being unkind. I cannot see her face fully, only the suggestion of a white coat at the edge of my vision.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Confused,’ I say honestly. ‘And sore.’
‘That’s understandable.’
The ambiguity of her reassurance unsettles me. Is it the confusion she expects, or the pain?
She explains the scan results: a small fracture in one vertebra, no obvious spinal cord damage, a period of enforced stillness while swelling subsides. The word fortunate appears more than once. It floats above me like something decorative and unearned.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘You were found at the bottom of your stairs by your housemate.’
The image of the figure returns, sharper now. ‘I was pushed.’
Again, that fractional pause. ‘We’ve informed the police of a potential assault. They may wish to speak with you.’
‘Is Laura here?’
‘She is. They’re speaking to her first.’
‘It wasn’t her.’ The certainty rises in me before I can examine it. ‘She was at work.’
‘We’ll confirm her alibi,’ the doctor replies.
Alibi. The word reshapes the room. It suggests plot. Motive. Structure.
Someone was in my house.
And it wasn’t Laura.
Laura arrives later, carrying with her the familiar scent of her citrus shampoo and the outside air.
‘Oh, Lexi,’ she says, her voice breaking on the edge of a laugh. ‘You scared the absolute life out of me.’
She tells me she found me at the bottom of the stairs, that for a moment she thought I was dead. I attempt humour in return – something about rent and shared bills – and immediately regret it when pain flares through my ribs. She looks both guilty and relieved at my response, as if my sarcasm confirms I am still myself.
‘The police questioned me for ages,’ she says. ‘As if I’d ever push you down the stairs.’
She rolls her eyes, but there is something brittle beneath it.
I study her face for signs of fracture, a flicker of avoidance, a tremor in her voice, but I see only exhaustion. Real fear leaves residue; she wears it openly.
When she leaves, the ward feels too large. The smoke alarm resumes its steady blink. I count without thinking.
My mother’s arrival announces itself before her body does.
‘My baby girl,’ she sobs, the words drenched in performance.
Her weight descends across my chest in a way that would suffocate me if I could move. The perfume she wears, something floral and excessively sweet, drags me backward through time with brutal efficiency.
Our childhood was structured around her moods. She was not a person so much as a climate: volatile, electrical, capable of warmth that could evaporate without warning. When she was absent, the house felt tentative; when she was present, it felt charged.
At twelve, I broke my arm in three places after failing to look sufficiently grateful for a second-hand jumper presented as a birthday gift in February. The hospital was told I’d fallen from my bike. At sixteen, when Cara told her she had a girlfriend, Mum reversed the car too quickly and crushed Cara’s foot against the kerb. ‘Didn’t see you,’ she’d said, as though visibility were the issue.
There were always explanations. Always accidents.
Now she weeps over me as though grief has found her unprepared.
The police officer who interrupts her does so politely. ‘Mrs Adams, could we have a word outside?’
Her body stiffens before she rearranges her face.
They leave.
The ward smells sterile, almost metallic. I close my eyes and return to counting. On. Off. On. Off. The rhythm is the only thing in the room that feels honest.
When the officer returns later, his tone is measured.
‘Miss Adams, we’ve arrested your mother.’
I do not startle. Something in me has been waiting for this shape to emerge.
‘For attempted murder.’
The words hover in the air between us. I imagine them settling onto paperwork, acquiring official weight.
‘Okay,’ I say.
He seems unsure what to do with my composure. After a moment, he leaves.
I watch the red light blink and feel something almost like relief.
Cara comes the next morning.
She draws the curtain around my bed before speaking, creating a small, private theatre within the ward.
‘You look terrible,’ she says gently, and the familiarity of it warms me.
‘Did you know they arrested Mum?’ I ask.
Her jaw tightens, but she does not look surprised.
‘For attempted murder.’
There is a pause in which the machines continue their steady beeping, indifferent to human revelation.
‘Well,’ she says eventually, ‘I hope they throw away the key.’
She takes my hand carefully, mindful of the tubes and the brace. We sit in silence for a while, the kind that belongs only to people who have survived the same weather.
‘I hope she stays away this time,’ I whisper.
Cara’s fingers thread through mine. I feel the slight tremor she cannot quite suppress.
‘I can’t believe it worked,’ she says quietly.
The word hangs between us.
Worked.
I don’t look at her. Instead, I focus on the ceiling, on the smoke detector, on the steady pulse of red.
‘You didn’t have to push me that hard,’ I say.
A breath. Then, practical as ever: ‘It had to be convincing.’
Convincing.
The fracture in my spine throbs in quiet agreement.
‘You broke my back,’ I murmur.
‘You’ll heal,’ she replies. ‘And she won’t come near us again.’
There it is. The logic. The arithmetic of damage. A small, contained injury in exchange for permanent distance.
Growing up with our mother taught us something essential: narrative is survival. If you can shape the story before someone else does, you can control the outcome. She taught us that, though she would never recognise it as a lesson.
The bang on the landing.
The careful timing.
The certainty in my voice when I said I’d been pushed.
The shadow I described.
All stories require a villain. Ours came pre-written.
I close my eyes and replay the moment at the top of the stairs. The pressure against my back. The surrender to gravity.
Memory is not a recording; it is a construction site. We build what we need from the materials available.
Above me, the smoke alarm continues its steady rhythm.
On. Off.
On. Off.
Cara squeezes my hand.
Pain radiates through my spine, real and insistent. But pain is persuasive. Pain lends credibility to narrative. Pain makes the story solid.
‘It’s done,’ she whispers.
I listen to the machines. To my own breathing. To the faint hum of the hospital beyond our curtain.
Is it?
The red light blinks again, unwavering.
I begin to count, not because I am afraid, but because counting gives structure to chaos. Because rhythm makes things bearable. Because stories, like heartbeats, rely on repetition.
And because next time, if there ever is one, we will know exactly how much force is required.