The Backs (2013) (7 page)

‘You know about the divorce, then?’

‘And Becca. The police told me.’

A brief frown came and went. ‘I did live there. I bought her out, then she wouldn’t leave,’ he said.

She guessed he didn’t want to get into an argument within the first few minutes of seeing her again, but she had no reason to feel the same way. ‘And you just let her?’ she snorted.

‘I didn’t want to have to fight her, not after we lost your sister . . . and you.’

He’d never been an expert at smiling: eyes down, thinking, frowning, working were basically his thing. Her mother always remarked that he hid behind his beard. Other times she said he hid behind his sculptures, or his unkempt appearance, or his ability to disengage from any conversation. Jane had always considered him easy to read and, long before adolescence had ruined her bond with him, she had been able to spot the way his expression always softened when they spoke. He took a step towards her and she caught the whiff of sweat and dust. She recoiled swiftly, keeping a sensible gap between them.

‘What is she doing in there, wrecking it for you? Look at the state of the place.’

‘I sleep at the studio. I don’t mind.’

Jane scowled at the house. ‘Who else is living in there?’

‘No one now.’

‘She’s got that whole fucking house to herself? That’s bollocks. She’s not cut out for living alone.’

‘Do you need to swear?’

‘Does it really matter? Really? Does it?’

He didn’t reply to that. Which meant it didn’t, but he’d be letting himself down just to say so. ‘Jane, your mother moved away. The house is empty now. I wanted to keep it, but I realized I didn’t want to be in it. I rented it out for a while. Now it needs too much work, so I’m selling it.’

Jane frowned at the house. ‘When?’

‘Right now. It’s been on the market since May.’

May? The month of change.

‘No one wants it at the asking price, and I can’t afford to sell it for much less. Can’t afford to have it standing empty for much longer, either. Forget the state of the economy, it’s done nothing compared to the destructive force of your mother.’

He wasn’t looking at her now, just staring across at his house and looking equally empty. Jane didn’t have room for sympathy, but she knew the creak of a door opening when she heard it. She didn’t say anything for almost a minute, running a fast double-check on her logic.

She picked up her rucksack, and he glanced back at her then, and she knew she had his full attention. He didn’t seem able to find any words, and she guessed he was scratching around for something fatherly to say that didn’t instantly sound insincere.

‘Would you let me live there?’

The creases in his forehead deepened. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to move back there.’

‘I don’t want you to.’ She eyed him carefully. ‘I just want a few weeks to sort myself out. All I had lined up was a fortnight on a mate’s sofa. I want a few weeks here instead.’

‘My God, you have a nerve. Then what? You just bugger off again?’

‘I don’t know – that’s the point.’

‘You only came back because the police brought you?’

‘Yeah, and it’s been different here to what I expected. At first I couldn’t think about anything except leaving, but now I think it would be good to spend some time at the house.’

‘The central heating’s knackered.’

‘It’s August.’

His stance changed: he positioned himself squarely and bowed his head slightly. Becca used to call it his charging-bull expression. It appeared just before he mowed his way through whatever obstacle stood in front of him.

‘I don’t know why I even mentioned the heating. I just don’t want you at the house. You don’t have any right to ask.’

‘Don’t I?’ She gave him a hard smile. ‘Thanks for telling me.’ She took a couple of steps backwards, then turned sharply away from him and started walking down Pound Hill towards North-ampton Street.

‘Jane?’

She didn’t acknowledge him. He called out again but no footsteps came after her. Was it any surprise he’d never managed to find her across all those years, when following her down the hill was too fucking much?

She’d rounded the bend and was about fifty yards short of the Punter pub when she heard him shout.

‘You win.’

She didn’t slow.

‘Damn you, Jane. Have the house.’

Jane returned with the keys just before 10 a.m. There were three in the bunch; front, side and back doors. She needed to duck under branches as she climbed the stone steps up to the house itself. The steps were smooth with age, though in places patterned with bursts of pale-green lichen. The paint on the front door was crumbling, so that dark blue flakes lay amongst the leaves scattered in the open porch. Some had gathered along the narrow gap between the door itself and the threshold, pinned there as if something was dragging at them from the other side. They were last autumn’s leaves, blown in during the dry winter. It made her wonder whether the estate agent had been inside at all.

Somehow it felt wrong to open the main door, so, even though the key was in her hand, she swapped it for the longer brass key next to it and headed for the side door. That entrance led into a four-foot-six hallway, then through another doorway into the kitchen. From there she would be able to silently observe the house, to watch it while it slept.

The side door opened easily. The air smelt earthy, a residue perhaps of all the times wellington boots and winter footwear had been removed and left to dry beneath the row of brass coat hooks.

The only movable item in the kitchen was a red-and-white striped mug with a missing handle and paint drips down one side. That sat on the draining board, and she put her rucksack down next to it. The stainless-steel sink was bone dry, the single spout tap over it encrusted with limescale, and an arc left by one last wipe-down lay across the surface in a milky smear.

Her shoes made a light padding sound on the solid floor as she crossed the kitchen gently, still not ready to cause any kind of stir. To the left of the doorway lay two rooms, with the entrance hall, staircase and another room to the right. She glanced along the hall towards the front door; from this side the paintwork looked white and intact. There was, of course, nothing sucking at those dead leaves from the inside, just a benign heap of junk mail and free newspapers on the thinning carpet. Like the exterior of the front door, it too had once been dark blue. Where it met the skirting she could see the original colour, and how the weave had resembled chunky corduroy.

Everywhere else the carpet had turned a dusty air-force blue, hers being amongst the footsteps that had caused that. Becca banging her way up the stairs, chaotic and shouting for help; Dan clattering down, heading for a date or a sports fixture, and leaving doors wide open behind him. She wondered what mark she’d left on the memory of this house. She remembered spending a lot of her time being quiet and serious and listening to everyone else. Maybe she’d never left a mark here and that’s how she’d found it so easy to slip unnoticed through all the intervening years.

The atmosphere began to feel oppressive, so she coughed loudly and said, ‘Upstairs then,’ just to break the silence.

The cat that lived in one of the houses behind theirs had been a bad-tempered tom. According to his red collar and heart-shaped name tag, his name was Twinkle and, although he was clearly someone’s much loved pet, his only skills seemed to be territorial. Jane paced around the upstairs rooms now like that cat would have done. She felt the need to enter each in turn, walk about them slowly, remind herself of the view from each window, then close the door carefully behind her as she left.

She had already made the decision to confine her living space to her old bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. But walking through the empty rooms felt like a rite. With each door she opened, she braced herself for experiencing further unexpected emotions. But instead the emptiness inside translated into blankness, nothingness, a silent vacuum. This place felt like a dusty Tussauds’ exhibit, the props and figures gone, and the deserted set exposed as something flimsy, meaningless and without any context.

She left her own room until last. The wallpaper was almost as she remembered it, cream adorned with blue stripes and sprays of sweet pea. She had thought the decor childish at the time, but now, strangely, it seemed far too mature for her: a room she would only grow into in twenty years or so, or maybe only in a different lifetime. She’d always doubted she’d make it to thirty, never mind almost fifty. She opened the window and the fresh air squeezed past her, pushing its way all round the room. She left it to chase out the staleness and retreated downstairs to the back room that her mother had called the playroom. There was a patio door leading into a short garden, but primarily this had been the room where the three kids, a TV set and a bunch of toys had been left to socialize. And, sure enough, they’d all developed a great relationship with that TV set.

The air felt damper here than it had upstairs, but just as still and forgotten, devoid of molecules of perspiration or exhalation and anything human that was more recent than the ever-present debris of dead skin cells and fallen hairs.

She had no desire to look into either the attic or the cellar, and her father had muttered to her that all the contents left behind were stored in the outhouse.

A painted, iron patio chair lay on its side in the grass. She brought that in first, then continued towards the brick-built shed beyond. It had a black painted door that looked like it had been made from four planks with a ‘Z” of timber to hold it in place.
Not locked, just full of crap
, according to her dad.

He hadn’t been wrong on either point.

She salvaged one saucepan, one dessert spoon, an old sun-lounger and a dustbin sack filled with pairs of old curtains. She piled them into her arms and, at the last moment, added a rusty shaving mirror and a jam jar containing an assortment of ball-point pens.

She dumped all of this just inside the playroom, then slipped out to buy enough groceries to last for the next couple of days. Once she returned, she changed her mind about sleeping upstairs and arranged the ‘bed’ and metal chair alongside one another, facing the patio doors but at enough of an angle that her own reflection wouldn’t stare back at her. In the end she didn’t use either but sat down on a folded curtain, with her back to the solid wall, and watched absolutely nothing happening out in the garden.

Sometime later she closed the curtains, and later still, when she realized she was too restless to sleep, she scooped up the pile of post and newspapers and dumped them on the playroom floor. She sat back down on the curtain, cross-legged this time, and began at the top of the heap, with what looked like the latest freebie newspaper. As she flicked through the first few pages, familiar place names jumped out from meaningless columns of text, stories of minor crimes or complaints from parents struggling through road works while making the school run. These were people who had probably never existed in Cambridge at the time she did, or only in previous incarnations. She’d been away long enough for students to turn into parents, and for most of last decade’s burning ambitions to be scuffed into nothingness by the intervening years.

She dumped the newspapers in one heap and, for no particular reason, started a junk-mail pile next to it. She glanced at each item in turn, learning that Cambridge now had the best opportunities for solar panels in East Anglia, the most exciting furniture store in the south, and at least three award-winning restaurants capable of dolloping their top cuisine into plastic tubs and delivering it to her own doorstep. Both the newspapers and the leaflets ran on a weekly loop, their headlines so bland that after the first few front pages each had less impact than the two-for-one pizza offer announced on the sidebar next to it. How many takeaway menus did one house ever need?

Occasionally an envelope lay amidst the other papers. The first few were white with printed labels and postage paid by someone running a stack of envelopes through a franking machine. A couple more had cellophane windows and advertised their sender with a logo printed on the front. Jane didn’t feel so bereft of a life that she needed to investigate correspondence from Bar-claycard to feel part of the human race, yet she did reach for the first handwritten envelope with perhaps a little too much keenness. It was pale lemon in colour, and the front read
The Osborne Family
– which probably explained why it had slipped through the postal-redirection service. Whatever her father had registered with the Post Office, it wouldn’t have included the word
Family.
The writing was shaky, its uneven strokes trying to recreate a once beautiful hand.
Aunt Gwen!
The name flashed into her head, just a name – and the memory of her mother’s aunt once sighted at a family wedding. A rarity, in fact, like the sighting of a barred warbler; a name you knew but a face you wouldn’t recognize in your own back yard.

It contained some kind of greetings card, and Jane slid it from the envelope. The front carried an uninspired photograph of a bunch of daffodils.
Happy Easter.
Months old now and from a relative disconnected by almost a decade.
To Gerry, Mary and family.

Jane stood it on the floor, and glanced at it every few minutes as she worked through the rest of the pile.

She didn’t consider herself as having one of those addictive personalities. Yes, she’d tried cigarettes, risked £1 each week on the lottery and enjoyed a couple of bottles of beer at the weekend, but she changed her behaviour often too. Dependence scared her: it felt like avoidable baggage. Now she could understand why alcoholics needed to not drink at all, not even a sip, because, after all these years, she could still taste her childhood and it was too intoxicating to ignore.

It surrounded her: the cracks, dents and scars in this old house that were suddenly so familiar, and the unfurling of other random, inconsequential memories that they unlocked. Familiar shouts from the other end of the house. The smell of bolognaise catching the bottom of the pan. Waking early to the strimmer clipping off the top of the grass in their tiny lawn.