by Keeley Young

It is a Monday, and it is my first day on the job. I was informed, in a letter addressed to my old apartment, that I would be moving. Moving because my application had been successful, although it now seemed less application and more interview-for-position. My apartment is on the ground floor, tucked inside behind the elevator—last night I slept here for the first time and listened to the creaking, or what I imagined to be creaking, and the shudder of the elevator doors the various times people left, or I presumed they left, the apartment building. I am the new caretaker of the building, however I came with very little experience in how to take care of an apartment building. I liked the affordable—dirt-cheap—rent, the proximity to many things, including the train station, and the promise of community. I was otherwise lonely, and the walls of the building seemed to hug me when I awoke.​

            Inside the little elevator, which had at one time, I like to imagine, been operated by an elevator attendant in a fine uniform with slicked, or gelled hair, I press the button for the eighth floor and orient myself with the job. I had awoken at six-seventeen this morning and in the quiet of reflection I sought new understanding of the board I had noticed the afternoon prior. It seemed to me a 2D diagram of the building itself, but removed of structure. It was not, I had noticed, in the exact shape of the building from the outside, but rather someone had pencil-outlined how many apartments were on each floor and moved themselves on. The ground floor had one square. The first floor above this had ten. It continued as such.​

            When I had showered and spooned a bowl of porridge into my mouth, the fifth apartment on floor eight seemed to faintly be glowing. I figured, then, that the architect of this designed illustration had rigged petite spotlights behind the board, but there was no way of knowing. The board itself was screwed in, set to the wall. I was hardly going to crash a hammer through on the first morning of my living there. The square glowed a faint yellow colour, brighter than the beige otherwise. Red would have been alarming. Green would have been too comforting. This yellow reminded me of a faraway lighthouse, and that I appreciated, that I recognised to be the rung-up call of whoever lived in the fifth apartment of the eighth floor. 85, or 8E. I am still not yet certain of the naming conditions of this building. My own apartment is merely labelled with an elaborately-designed G.​

            It is curious, this uppercase G, a shade of green like ferns on my otherwise greying and lacking in any noticeable colour door. The G is not made of wood or metal, but does seem of an organic material, not plastic, or something cheaply-made in a sweatshop. It seems original to the building, as antique and embedded as the tiling of the lobby, which is cracked in many places, including at the door of my apartment. One sprouting crack extends from the north-west corner of the tile to the south-east. Yesterday I lifted my suitcase over it. To be safe. My mother is still in good health.​

            The elevator climbs to the eighth floor and chimes on arrival. I was forewarned sometimes the elevator doors require a nudge to open cleanly—they are routinely oiled, and yet, old machinery can only be so void of its temperaments, which is what the previous owner of my new apartment had mentioned over the phone. Of course, I had only assumed it was the previous owner. They never once said they lived there, only that the one-bedroom unit was familiar to them, as was the responsibility. Singular, which I had internally questioned. Why only one? Or why universal? I did not test the patience of the woman on the other end of the phone, who pleasantly reminded me I would like living in this building. Accidentally I had mentioned I hated being out in the sun.

            ‘There are plenty of amenities,’ she had confessed, rambling on. ‘Some of the disused apartments have been converted, or, well,’ and she paused, to clear her throat. ‘Some of the residents leave their keys under rugs, or otherwise do not lock their front doors. This will all become apparent to you, but there is an apartment on the third floor whose tenant has converted the living room into a yoga studio, and of course, given your status, you are waived the fee.’ The previous whomever continued on discussing amenities, but I had frozen on status. Of course by then I knew I was to be caretaker to the Armbrook Apartments, but there had been no expectation of perks. Whether you consider free yoga to be a perk or not matters little.

            The eighth floor of the building has an unusual smell. It is not disturbing, or disgusting, but is to me like two distinctly-different colognes mixed together in a cauldron pot and splashed haphazardly onto the carpet. It is more noticeable the lower you are—in the interest of being nosy, I squatted to the ground as if to find the source. Mentally, I wondered whether hiring someone to clean the carpets was a priority, but I expected there was a heavy, lavender-purple carpet cleaner in a closet in the basement I instead would have to shove into the elevator by myself. I like cleaning. I can like cleaning. In preparation, I have been telling myself, committing it to memory, that a can-do attitude will be most beneficial. So far I am distracting myself and walking slowly instead.

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Apartment 8E has a red door. None of the other apartments on this floor have red doors, but the paint is not noticeably fresh. I remind myself to check if there is an Armbrook Guide to what residents can and cannot do, in case I catch someone engaging in an activity against proper outlines, but a red door seems just a red door. I knock, hoping I sound patient, and listen out when a voice announces first itself, then that I can come right in. For some bizarre reason, I tentatively touch the red instead of grasping only the door handle. Dry. As the door swings open, the paint does look noticeably wetter.

            ‘Oh.’ A woman crooks her head when she notices me in the entryway. I realise I came entirely empty-handed, but the board in my apartment gave me no indication of her query, only that her apartment was glowing yellow. ‘You’re tall. Can you fetch down the scrapbox on top of the fridge?’ I glance quickly from her, a dark-haired woman in overalls, to the refrigerator, where a hatbox papier-mâched with newspaper is tucked behind an open cereal box. I want to ask if she pressed some secretive button to request for me simply to collect down a box, but instead I move into the kitchen and attempt to reach the hatbox on my tiptoes.

            The woman comes into the kitchen moments later with a stepstool. ‘You will break it,’ she says, and the ease of the stepstool allows me swiftly to retrieve the box. This could not have been it, I think, making polite glances at the woman. She is around my own age, or younger, her dark-raven hair loosely down, past her shoulders. ‘You are very timely.’ She directs me to set the hatbox down and she moves the stepstool once more, disappearing into another room. When she returns, she makes a whimsical motion with her eyes, as if going cross-eyed, and laughs.

            ‘Sorry, I am pushy,’ she says, uncapping the hatbox. ‘It’s nice to meet you, new caretaker. Most people call me Red,’ and in unison we both say, ‘because of the door.’

            She fusses with the uppermost contents of what she called the scrapbox—it is filled to the brim with photographs and clippings and scraps of paper with drawings of various creatures and plants. There is a detailed sketch of a maple leaf, which she folds in half and sets down on the counter, unbothered by it. ‘My name is harder to remember, or easier to forget, but the first thing people see of course when they come to meet me is the awfully-painted door. Really I am no artist, new caretaker.’ She lifts out of the hatbox a detailed drawing of a snail. ‘The book of yours will list me as Amaryllis. My neighbour has started to call me Ama.’ She paused, then pointed to the ceiling. ‘My above calls me Lillis.’

            Amaryllis continues to sort through the scrapbox, giving me no idea to her intentions, or in truth why I was summoned here at all. It begins to become apparent it was perhaps exactly for the labour of moving the box. I restrain myself from glancing at my watch. There is no reason to be offended by her company. Although if there is a book of the residents of the Armbrook Apartments, it is the sort of night-time reading I might need to understand how many people could call upon me for menial tasks such as these.

            It would be inappropriate for me to avoid asking why I came to her apartment. ‘Was there something else I could help you with?’ I ask, as Amaryllis-Red is amidst her rummage. She glances briefly from the box to me, then to the box, and then finally back to me.

            ‘Oh, right.’ Inside of the hatbox she withdraws a photograph, creased at all four corners, and thrusts it out in front of her. ‘First I wanted to welcome you to the building,’ she says, and I begin to study not merely the condition of the photograph—it is bent as if it had been folded in many, many different ways—but its contents, too. No one in the frame is familiar or recognisable to me. This is either her family, friends, or she was at least holding the camera and kept this copy as a memento. There are three in the image, of similar age, likely in their twenties. It is timestamped from two years ago, although the fact there is a timestamp makes me question how old of a camera was used to take said photograph. Although I am not one to photograph anything myself. I do not like the reminders.

            Amaryllis’ tone shifts. She is now softer, removed from the fussing and the whimsy which had given her the vibrance of an early bird. I would have been the worm. ‘These are my friends,’ she says, ‘they used to live in the building.’ The three in the image are wearing winter clothes, and the timestamp correlates to early August. One, the girl in the middle with hair as yellow as corn, is wearing a white beret the same overdone shape as a marshmallow. She is the only one looking at the camera—the two boys, flanking her on either side, their arms draped loosely over her shoulders, are staring at each other.

            My intense study of the photograph is interrupted by a subtle cough from Amaryllis. ‘I need a new bulb in the bathroom. It went dark last night when I was showering.’ Lowering the picture, I try to hand it back to her, but she gives a short nod at the hatbox and we are suddenly in her bathroom, staring up at the overhead light. It does in fact not glow anymore, which I find ironic, but I do not mention. There is a smell in the bathroom, and I start to believe it is not the mixed-up, overpowered waft of the two colognes from the hallway, but one cologne, isolated. There are various perfume bottles near the bathroom sink, but they are unfamiliar to me, with names in languages I do not recognise immediately.

            ‘Do you have lightbulbs?’ Amaryllis is studying me with curiosity, or that is what I want to believe. Yesterday I had little time to scout what the apartment did or did not have, and this morning I awoke in a state of confusion which only worsened when the board began to glow. There would be a cupboard, or closet, of supplies somewhere, as was foretold, or forewarned, but I had yet to find it. Already I needed a lightbulb. Already I wondered what had happened to her friends, although it wasn’t my business. Although she made it mine. I think.

 

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I begin to systematically root through the apartment in search of a lightbulb, or what I hope would be a stash of them. There is a hardware store three blocks from the building, but I do not want to delay helping Amaryllis if I do not have to. I had almost asked if I could call her Ama, but chickened out and left the apartment. Inside a closet, I find a wooden chest of door handles. No door handle matches. Nor do they need to, I suppose, setting the chest down again in the closet. No bulbs there.

            The apartment is beginning to unwind itself to me, nooks revealing secret stashes of stamps from decades ago, crannies revealing notepads doodled with outlines of labelled stains. In a suitcase underneath the bed I find a binder detailing the various residents of the Armbrook Apartments, first and last names, approximate ages, approximate occupations, and two lightbulbs in their original packaging. I let out a grateful chirp and gather up one lightbulb box before glancing back at the board of squares. 8E still remains aglow in yellow, but none of the other apartments make a whisper.

            As I screw in the new bulb, Amaryllis eyes me off. I feel her lingering glance.

            ‘It’s a white colour, I hope,’ she says, her hands on her lips. Nothing about her presence in the bathroom seems, to me, judgemental, and she is hardly impatient. I refit the new lightbulb as if I am vastly knowledgeable in handywork, and it feels competent, as if living now in the ground floor backroom has reawakened in me an ability to do basic around-the-home tasks. I await, now, a resident asking me to fix something more elaborate, such as the heating for their apartment, and I will buckle, or I expect myself to. Inside of myself I make a mental note to search for files and manuals on repairing machinery, because a self-sufficient approach has overcome me already. Or the building expects it of me. I sense a character to the place. Bigger than walls.

            The light again works, and Amaryllis beams at me with a warm smile and invites me into the kitchen for a cup of tea, which tastes unusually organic, and a shortbread biscuit that looks like a lumbered piece of wood. It doesn’t taste dry, at least. She is looking over me as I take another sip. ‘Are you liking the job?’ It feels a tad rushed of a question, but I figure she has no true knowledge over whether this is my very first day or not. I convince myself of that. Amaryllis is fondling a button on the overalls.

            ‘There is a very efficient system,’ I say, wondering whether she, or anyone else living here, knows exactly about the board in my flat, gleaming its yellow indicator. I realise I had never glanced around near the entrance of Amaryllis’ apartment for a panel including an oversized button labelled for “caretaker help”, but I figured it was amongst the likely intercom interface apartments such as these could have. Before this, I had lived in a house. It was one-storey and did not have a single staircase, let alone a thundering elevator. One day I had indeed found a rat living in the pantry, however, and before kicking him from the kitchen with a broom I christened him Rowley.

            We talked for a time, although I soon became acutely aware there might be other bursting orbs of yellow lighting up one corner of the room on the ground floor. I hunker as the elevator slides itself downward. The building has feelings, or a nervous system, at least, and I brush up against it every time I decide against taking the stairs. Everyone who lives here must have impressive thighs, I thought, exiting the elevator.

 

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Two days later, the apartment 8E lights up again. I am sitting on a stool in front of the board, sipping from a cup of elderberry tea, when I notice the sudden shift in light. At this point, various other residents of the Armbrook Apartments are known to me—there is an elderly couple on the second floor who once were cobblers, a man in his thirties on the sixth floor who decided upon calling me Fox as a sort of pet name, already, and there is a woman in her forties on the tenth floor with frighteningly-cold hands. She passed me something on the way out of her apartment and I brushed against her icy fingers, attempting to ground myself from shuddering from the touch. She did not seem to notice, or did not say anything.

            Amaryllis has not asked for anything since the lightbulb, but I amble back into the elevator. An hour earlier I had been on the twelfth floor assisting an elderly man in curing, as he put it, the ghastly squeak of all the doors in his unit. He said his name was Edgar. There was hair growing out of his ears, and the main rooms of his place smelled bitterly of liquorice. He made small talk about the altitude of the twelfth floor—there is a view from this window, he said, leaning his body weight against the back wall, fifteen years ago I could see the old water tower before they dismantled it.

            I gently rap on Amaryllis’ unforgiving red door and wait for her to call out. As of yet, her willing me to let myself in has not become a habit, a routine, but twice is not an exception. Or that is how I see it. ‘Come on in, please,’ she announces and I twist the handle and move inside her apartment.

            There is something noticeably different about the entryway. The smells, yes, are different to the perfume of two days earlier. It is a more natural odour, not unpleasant to be called a stench, but I think somehow I have been transported to a forest. The woodlands I played in as a child when my mother reminded me to go busy myself when she volunteered her support to the church. The carpet is brighter, too, but the carpet has grown. Like grass. The carpet is grass.

            ‘Kind caretaker, thank you for continuing to be so diligent,’ she says as I attempt to readjust to how shifted her apartment now seems. If not for the obvious ceiling, the four walls, the waft of air conditioning, I would have been freshly convinced we have been transported somewhere else, somewhere outdoors. The grass crunches underfoot and there is a pine tree growing in the corner, as if Christmastime meant planting into the ground of your living room, and not buying something plastic on artificial legs. Amaryllis notices I am gobsmacked at the tree. ‘Oh. I was missing the woods one morning. I ordered a tree, the same as you order a new loveseat.’ She fusses with the branches as if it is fake, something to be obsessively pruned with her fingers.

            I can hardly think of what to say to her, so instead, I pivot.

            ‘How can I help you?’ My words come out automatic, robotic, and I feel myself shifting into the expected role of the job, to distract myself, not consequence myself. There must be some reason for her summons, although whether or not it was to surprise upon me the tree…

            Amaryllis laughs. ‘Right, of course,’ she says, pacing into the kitchen. I wait for her to gesture to the hatbox again, wait for the word scrapbox, but instead she opens one of the lower drawers and retrieves a letter-opener. There is a small painted A on the handle of it. ‘I used to sleep with this underneath my pillow.’ She brandishes the letter-opener like a weapon, poking out the sharper end towards me. ‘Before I moved into this apartment, silly. I used to live in a dangerous neighbourhood.’

As if conjuring images in front of her, I saw crime and chaos, a stoop unguarded, unprotected, a younger version of this woman keeping herself nimbly poised by the front door with the letter-opener, although in this sight it was made of a natural material, not silver, maybe wood.

            ‘Envelopes are so easy to tear, sometimes I dig into them with my teeth.’ Amaryllis sheathes the silver utensil into her sleeve and holds it there, threateningly, but not towards me. As if her enemy is the floor—the grass which seems to have begun to grow and spread into the kitchen, replacing tile. ‘I want to tell you a story. It is somewhat about this,’ and she withdraws it again, extending an arm towards me so I can study the letter-opener in closer detail. There is a stain underneath the legs of the letter A, something permanent. Blood, if the tool is to be believed as a self-defence tactic, I think, flipping it over in my hand. Not at all weighty.

            ‘Come and sit with me in the grass.’

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​

We make ourselves comfortable in her living room, which looks less and less like my own apartment by the minute. The ceiling is the colour of sky, and I glimpse up at it in my crosslegged spot as the dark-haired tenant plumps a cushion that resembles an oversized mushroom and sits down herself.

            ‘Once upon a time,’ she says, leaning forward, a cheeky smile forming before another word can be spoken. ‘That was how they began stories, isn’t it? As if it can only happen once, and that it happened so, so very long ago, it couldn’t possibly happen now.’ She moves her toes through the tufts of grass, and I think, for just a moment in these make-believe woods, that I can hear a stream trickling from somewhere behind me. Her bathroom, perhaps.

            ‘Once upon a time, there was a girl who got so frequently associated with the colour red her apartment door, try as she might, could not disguise itself.’ Amaryllis winks at me, and I almost glance at her door, I think of it, but our gaze does not separate. ‘They call the girl Red. And she is young, she is bright and chaotically full of life, and perhaps she is protective of her skin from the sun. So she wears a cloak. A hood. It is noticeable in the deep, dark, scary wood.’

            ‘The girl had a much more favourable relationship with her grandmother than her own mother,’ she continues, dropping her head, ‘which displeased her, but what could you do?’ She shrugs, her storytelling taking on visual gestures, body movements. ‘So, of course, she ran off when no one would notice her missing, later to concoct an excuse of worry about her grandmother, but really she simply wanted to bake cookies with her and pretend the house in the woods were her real home.’

            Amaryllis smiles over at me, continuing her story. ‘Little Red’s grandmother lived removed from gentrification, from deforestation, of course, no one had bulldozed that part of the woods for more and more townhouses.’ She grimaces and digs her hands into the grass. ‘It was the right way to be, and the girl loved disappearing into darkness, distracted by the whimsy of her imagination. Is that a scary beast come to devour her flesh? No, it is a man, she realised, come to do all the same, except he would call it marriage.’ The story is taking a dark turn, and it is not like what I remember from when I was little, when my own mother had told me fairytales to put me to slumber. Those were bitter, but came to some happy end, whether the predator was slain or the stepmother vanished into the night.

            ‘The part I wanted to come to,’ she says, glancing at me with an earnestness previously unseen from her, ‘is that the girl was frightened everywhere but her grandmother’s, and this story is about how even this unfrightening place became unsafe for her. With nowhere to run, she was backed into a corner, terrified of the furry, fangy wolf. There came a vision of her grandmother in the kitchen, or what was the kitchen of the small, small cottage. It was but a benchtop, a cupboard, and the hearth with the pot for cooking, for magic potion brewing, the girl would imagine. Stories were more exciting than consequences.’ Amaryllis sighs and out of the grass surrounding us she removes a jagged square of sketch-paper. She studies it carefully.

            ‘Little Red, Little Red. Your grandmother is dead, howled out the wolf.’ She says this at first without any emotion at all, but word by word she unravels herself, becoming more animated, more alive. It is the way I imagine a storyteller in a library would speak life to the sentence, creating ambiance, scaring, only slightly, the young ones keenly listening in from the front row. Amaryllis hands me the piece of sketch-paper and I turn it over in my hands. It is a drawing, refined and refined, not messily sketched in a quick sitting, of an elderly woman. A grandmother.

            ‘The girl was too stunned to say a whisper, she thought her own life was coming to an end. She cowered against the wood of her grandmother’s cottage in the undisturbed forest and wondered whether it would have been nicer, then, had other cottages dotted the wood, had gravel paths linked house to house, had there been a neighbourhood watch hunting out monsters knocking where uninvited.’ She shakes her head now, taking the paper from me, disappearing it again into the carpet of grass. ‘Would it have mattered, she thought…monsters can shapeshift.’

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After Amaryllis had told me the story, I waited all week and then some for another chance to go to her apartment and ask her whether she really, somehow, so miraculously, was the girl she spoke of in it. Little Red Riding Hood has existed in storytelling for an unknowable amount of time, but it had felt personal, or she had interspersed herself into the story of the girl who met the big, bad wolf in the woods. I am still unsure. I sit here now in my little ground-floor flat making short glances at the board, willing her light to flash yellow, but it is a darkened day. I vacuum the floors. Spray and wipe the mirror in my bathroom. Tidy the various boxes, suitcases, and collections of assorted things I too have started to collect since starting my work here as caretaker of the Armbrook Apartments.

            I am in the middle of polishing my shoes when suddenly a glow of yellow becomes noticeable out of the corner of my eye. I leap up, expecting the disappointment of 2B, the elderly woman-cobbler wondering who had stolen her newspaper, but I am stunned. 8E again.

            In the elevator on the way up, passing floor by floor, I wonder what I will say to her this time. Whether I will mention the story, whether I believe her to be ripped out of the pages of books. I had lingered in the bookstore two blocks from the apartment building, browsing other titles as I mulled over whether or not it would be odd to purchase a collection of fairytales, including the story of Little Red. It would not be so defined by experience, by modern life as juxtaposition, but…I made no decision, and left the store instead with a new work of fiction from a promising author.

            At the painted red door, I knock, and for once she is there twisting the handle, inviting me inside herself instead of calling out from the reaches within. Today she is wearing cherry-red pants and a grey t-shirt with a picture of a bear sitting upright on it. The bear’s hind legs are out in a triangle sort of shape and it is wearing a bib with a picture of a cartoon salmon on it. Amaryllis brings me inside into her apartment and is darker than thought to be possible. The windows seem non-existent, hidden behind a screen of pine trees. I almost trample a collomia flower and take careful effort from then on to watch where I am stepping. The room is scattered with forest-floor life, flowers, leaves, mushrooms, petite ferns. I almost expect a little critter to come scurrying across my feet, startled by my largeness.

            ‘This is a deception,’ she says, standing close to me but not inappropriately so. ‘There is no issue with the light, or the plumbing, or the hatbox being on top of the refrigerator.’ She smiles, and digs her hands into the pockets of the cherry-red pants. ‘Like you have come through my door, I once came through a door of my own. Into this world, from the thickets. My dangerous neighbourhood,’ she finishes, and I wonder whether she stands there waiting for me to gasp in disbelief, or shake her out of it, threaten the mental hospital five blocks to the south of the building.

            ‘Another universe?’

            She shakes her head. ‘It’s not convoluted like that, caretaker. Your predecessor knew, she understood. The people of this building know another world, the one they used to call home. There is a series of comic books you should see if the bookstore sells. Our story is like that, because our stories are told over and over again, and no one tires of them.’ Amaryllis sighs and takes her hands out of her pockets, moving further into the living-room-come-woods.

            ‘I took on this name, a name shortened down to Ama, because living here is a fresh start. You must have moved here thinking it would be the same. Whatever your story is, kind caretaker, you deserve to start anew. This is how we decided to welcome you.’

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I leave her apartment feeling many things. Confused, I suppose, and yet comforted, too. I had worried, on the very first day, whether I was capable of a great many things as the job had outlined. Fixing. Reconstructing. Helping. Perhaps I am confused, but perhaps I like the little flat on the ground floor behind the elevator, and perhaps I like the red door on the eighth floor concealing a secret forest.

            Concealing a girl in red, who misses her grandmother.

            In the late afternoon I walk to the hardware store and ask them to point me towards their assortment of door handles. I pick out one I like, and ask them to ring it up for me. Only the one door handle, isn’t that odd. I wonder what they think of me. I walk out of the hardware store clutching onto the door handle. I wonder what the world thinks of me.