The door buzzes wrong the first time, brrrp–dead, and my thumb slips on the cold metal plate like it’s already drunk, try again, brrrp–click, and the door gives in reluctantly, swinging open like it wasn’t entirely convinced about letting another fool inside, and warm air rushes out in a sudden generous spill — thick with the smell of too many bodies pressed close, cheap red wine gone vinegary, damp wool coats steaming off the night’s chill, and that faint greasy ghost of something fried hours ago that’s still clinging to the corners.

     Immediately the sound crashes over me, but it isn’t music yet, just the pre-music thrum-thrum bass trying to remember its own name, vibrating up through the floorboards like a heartbeat that’s been running late, and voices overlap in loose, tangled cables, and laughter cracks open sharp then reseals itself mid-flight, and half-finished sentences tumble down like loose change from someone’s pocket.

     The stairwell pulls me in, narrow and tall, that old Georgian throat spiralling up and up forever, white walls scuffed into a slow biography of every hand that ever brushed them on the way up hopeful or down disappointed, banister polished smooth by decades of palms sliding along it, warm and slick with the sweat and secrets of strangers’ nights. Coats like shed skins lie piled on the first landing, still breathing out cold fog, shoulders slumped in defeat, and the light flickers and wavers, blink-bonk, already tipsy, bulb half-gone and swaying like it’s had one too many before the party even started.

     I begin to climb. Step-squeak, step-thud, step-swish — each footfall amplified then swallowed, and the sound bounces ahead of me then returns late like an answer to a question I never asked, echoing up the spiral and back down changed. Voices from above tumble down in ragged chunks — half-arguments that never resolve, half-jokes that land soft then sharp, and there’s someone shouting a name that hangs unanswered in the air, and up ahead a bottle opens with that clean bright pop! slicing through the murk like sudden punctuation in a long rambling sentence.

     The walls talk too, if you listen sideways — old plaster creak-murmur, hidden pipes hissing secrets, radiator ticking tickticktick like a metronome counting down to something inevitable — and I pass faces I half-recognise, half-don’t, people leaning against the banister mid-conversation, drinks sloshing dangerously over the edges, eyes already shiny with the promise of forgetting something important later, maybe tomorrow morning when the light comes cruel and honest. “Alright mate?” “Aye.” “Coat there.” “Sound.” Language stripped to bone, syllables doing the heavy lifting of whole paragraphs, words reduced to grunts and nods that carry the weight of years.

     Up another flight, past a mirror nailed slightly crooked on the wall, and my reflection lags a half-beat behind me, face stretched long and strange by the stairwell’s jaundiced light that turns me more nocturnal than I feel, more hollow-eyed, more like a man who’s already left himself somewhere downstairs — and for a second I don’t know the stranger staring back, but I’m not alarmed, only curious, like spotting an old friend in the wrong city, wearing the wrong coat, carrying the wrong ghosts.

     The sound envelops now, the bass grows teeth, music snaps finally into shape — beat-skipping, lyric-chewing, vibrating up through the banister straight into my bones. Even the air changes texture — it’s warmer, heavier, wine-breath and citrus peel and fresh sweat beginning their slow, intimate chemical conversation, mingling with the faint coal-smoke ghost from someone’s fireplace far below. The stairwell narrows, closes in, pays attention, and the walls lean closer as if they want to hear what happens next.

     I pause on the landing without meaning to, that small hesitation-space where you can still turn back, still pretend you forgot your keys or your courage or your name, and the thought skids through clean and cold — too late now — factual as gravity, inevitable as the next breath. Above, someone laughs too hard, the kind of laugh that polishes a story into legend while it’s still happening, raw and bright and doomed to fade by dawn. Below, the door buzzes again, brrrp–click, as another body enters the vertical river, footsteps chasing mine up the spiral — echo-echo, chase-chase — and for a moment the whole stairwell feels like the inside of a drum you’re trapped in, every movement making sound, every sound bouncing back altered, richer, sadder.

     Hand on the banister now, and the wood feels warm under the palm, grain slick with the accumulated nights of other people’s lives, fingers picking up their heat, their hurry, their small desperations without asking permission. Music surges harder, voices rise in waves, the party above swelling into something solid, something you could almost step into like a room made of smoke and promise.

     One more turn of the spiral. The stairwell exhales me onto the upper landing like it’s finally finished its job, tired of carrying me. Coats are piled high and careless, shoes kicked loose in a tangle of laces, a sad drooping plant in the corner pretending not to notice anything, trying to stay uninvolved in the human mess. And the flat door ahead stands wide open, and light spills out in a wide generous rectangle of gold, and the noise pours through it like a slow incoming tide — laughter, bass, clinking glass, the low roar of people pretending they’re not lonely tonight.

     I stand there a beat longer than necessary, and my heart does its quiet jazz-rattle against the ribs. Mouth dry-wet at once. Head loosening its grip on the day, on the reasons, on the small careful fences I built around myself. Then I step forward. And the night takes another inch, another mile, another piece of whatever was left unbroken, patient as rust, waiting to see what kind of story I’ll become by morning.