All day long, and often into the early hours of the morning the tramp of feet sounded up and down the stairs outside Ward's cubicle.  Built into a narrow alcove in a bend of the staircase between the fourth and fifth floors, its plywood walls flexed and creaked with every footstep like the timbers of a rotting windmill.  Over a hundred people lived in the top three floors of the old rooming house, and sometimes Ward would lie awake on his narrow bunk until 2 or 3 A.M., mechanically counting the last residents returning from the all-night movies in the stadium half a mile away.  Through the window he could hear giant fragments of the amplified dialogue booming among the rooftops.  The stadium was never empty.  During the day the huge four-sided screen was raised on its davit and athletics meetings or football matches ran continuously.  For the people in the houses abutting the stadium the noise must have been unbearable.

Ward, at least, had a certain degree of privacy.  Two months earlier, before he came to live on the staircase, he had shared a room with seven others on the ground floor of a house in 755th Street, and the ceaseless press of people jostling past the window had reduced him to a state of chronic exhaustion.  The street was always full, an endless clamour of voices and shuffling feet.  By 6:30, when he woke, hurrying to take his place in the bathroom queue, the crowds already jammed it from sidewalk to sidewalk, the din punctuated every half minute by the roar of the elevated trains running over the shops on the opposite side of the road.  As soon as he saw the advertisement describing the staircase cubicle he had left (like everyone else, he spent most of his spare time scanning the classifieds in the newspapers, moving his lodgings an average of once every two months) despite the higher rental.  A cubicle on a staircase would almost certainly be on its own.

However, this had its drawbacks.  Most evenings his friends from the library would call in, eager to rest their elbows after the bruising crush of the public reading room.  The cubicle was slightly more than four and a half square metres in floor area, half a square over the statutory maximum for a single person, the carpenters having taken advantage, illegally, of a recess beside a nearby chimney breast.  Consequently Ward had been able to fit a small straight-backed chair into the interval between the bed and the door, so that only one person at a time need to sit on the bed - in most single cubicles host and guest had to sit side by side on the bed, conversing over their shoulders and changing places periodically to avoid neckstrain.

"You were lucky to find this place," Rossiter, the most regular visitor, never tired of telling him.  He reclined back on the bed, gesturing at the cubicle.  "It's enormous, the perspectives really zoom.  I'd be surprised if you hadn't got at least five metres here, perhaps even six."

Ward shook his head categorically.  Rossiter was his closest friend, but the quest for living space had forged powerful reflexes.  "Just over four and a half, I've measured it carefully.  There's no doubt about it."

Rossiter lifted one eybrow.  "I'm amazed.  It must be the ceiling then."

Manipulating the ceiling was a favourite trick of unscrupulous landlords - most assessments of area were made upon the ceiling, out of convenience, and by tilting back the plywood partitions the rated area of cubicle could be either increased, for the benefit of a prospective tenant (many married couples were thus bamboozled into taking a single cubicle), or decreased temporarily on the visits of the housing inspectors.  Ceilings were criss-crossed with pencil marks staking out the rival claims of tenants on opposite sides of a party wall.  Someone timid of his rights could be literally squeezed out of existence - in fact, the advertisement "quiet clientele" was usually a tacit invitation to this sort of piracy.

"The wall does tilt a little," Ward admitted.  "Actually, it's about four degrees out - I used a plumb-line.  But there's still plenty of room on the stairs for people to get by."