Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Mum, you don’t seem well.’

  But her voice came out thin and vicious. ‘Sneaking,’ she said. ‘You’ve both been sneaking around. Like what? Like you thought I was crazy? Like I was going to disapprove? Like I was someone to be scared of?’

  ‘No, Mum, I just –’

  ‘You two have been talking about me together. Discussing what a terrible mother I am.’

  ‘Mrs Krause, Cathy, no –’

  ‘You’re hilarious, both of you. You don’t even know what disapproval looks like. You want to see what it’s like? What it’s really like?’

  ‘Mum –’

  ‘Nassim, can you please leave?’ Mum said, levelling a stare at him.

  There was silence. A test. This was a test. Of what, I had no idea.

  ‘Well of course I can, Cathy. You’re clearly not feeling well,’ said Nassim. ‘This wasn’t a good time.’

  But Mum pointed her finger at him. ‘I’m fine. I just want you to leave. Quickly! And I don’t want you in my house again.’

  ‘Mum! What are you talking about?’

  And then she snapped. She threw her persona off like a cloak. ‘Leave!’ she shrieked. And then she threw her glass on the bench in front of Nassim and it shattered, spraying wine and glass all over him. He had raised his arm up to protect his face, and his bare forearm had a small piece of glass embedded in it. ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ she screamed.

  I was going to vomit. This was the worst thing I had ever seen, had ever felt. ‘Mum! Please stop! Mum!’

  The bright white cupboard doors and stainless-steel fridge were decorated with spatters of red, like the scene of an accident, or a crime. Mum looked from the red-spattered benchtop to the blood beading on Nassim’s arm as he picked the glass shard from his skin, and she put her hand to her own face in horror, and then she ran. She ran up the stairs then the door to her room slammed shut, and moments later I heard her sobbing.

  I crouched down on the floor and with shaking fingers began picking up the violent jigsaw of broken glass. Nassim crouched next to me. ‘Why don’t you leave that,’ he said, taking my shaking hands in his own. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘It’s not usually like that,’ I said, but my voice was cracked. ‘I can usually handle her. Usually she just needs putting to bed or something . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, drawing my hand.

  But I shook my head. ‘You don’t have to be nice to me –’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘At least just come outside with me for a bit.’

  We stepped out onto the street and Nassim held me. ‘You should have told me, Anna,’ he said. ‘You could have told me.’

  And I leaned right into him and cried and cried and cried.

  16

  The big front door of Bromley Cairn shifted easily. I hadn’t expected that. That wouldn’t happen in a movie. But once inside, the wooden floor creaked just as it should.

  I stood looking around, my nose registering the smells of dry dust and damp stone – an air that was both brittle and earthy all at once. It was a venerable, tempered smell – much better than fresh mouse.

  When the top floor didn’t instantly cave in on me, I stepped further into the house and closed the door behind me. Immediately the outside sounds, the windy rushing of air, the mellifluous sing-songing of high-up birds, the lower down chipping and cawing of sparrows and crows, all stopped. It was perfectly silent. I breathed in and then out, inhaling the calm and the silence and the old settled smell.

  I was standing in half-light in the little entrance hall. The boarded windows let in only choreographed slivers of light through the church-like dimness, spotlighting random items of abandonment littered across the floorboards – a shard of mirror, a crumpled beer can, a single torn sneaker, an ashtray – picking them out like holy objects. A shadowy wooden staircase rose in front of me. Everywhere else was dim except for the closed door to the room to my left. The frame around it glowed, like golden sunlight was trying to burst right through it.

  I pushed the door inwards and stepped inside.

  I squinted, instantly bathed in light. The sun had done its coming-out trick again and was throwing a big, window-shaped yellow square of light onto the floor. There was a large table placed under the bright window – the one ground-floor window still intact – and a single mattress was propped up against a wall. There was no other furniture in the room, and the wooden floorboards were dusty but free of rubbish. The whole place felt sparse and bright and clear.

  I went straight back across to the little house and found Bette sitting in an armchair off the alcove, actually knitting like a grandmother from a fairytale, watching daytime soaps.

  ‘Grandma?’ I said.

  ‘Hmm?’ She angled her head towards me without actually taking her eyes off the television. Clearly I’d interrupted an important bit – a passionate embrace was playing out; someone was about to walk in, you could just feel it, and then of course they did: shocked face, long camera shot, prolonging the moment . . . I waited until it flicked to the ad break then tried again.

  ‘Grandma, do you know if there is actually power in the old house?’

  ‘In the old house?’

  ‘Yes, in Bromley Cairn. I’ve just been over there and I noticed the power points.’

  ‘Oh yes, Hessel put them in years ago. They run on the same power as here, as far as I know.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘You went inside, did you say?’ Bette stopped knitting.

  ‘Yes. I wanted to try setting up a study desk over there so I can give you and Hessel a bit of space.’

  She looked concerned. ‘Oh, Anna, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’

  ‘Oh, just because.’ She dithered. She seemed at a loss. ‘Just wait there, let me get your grandfather.’ She put down her knitting and shuffled off out the back door. The program returned from the ad break and played exactly the same scene Bette had just watched, milking it for all the advertising time it was worth.

  Bette returned with Hessel in tow, and without any preamble Hessel said, ‘No, Anna. This is not a good idea. We haven’t made the floor safe yet. It’s not safe. Okay?’ He clapped his hands and turned to leave again, as though that was it, the subject was closed.

  I caught Bette looking at me pityingly and I smelled an opening. ‘But I wouldn’t touch anything,’ I said, and Hessel lingered in the doorway. ‘It’s just, well, I don’t want to stay here if I can’t study.’ As well as being manipulative, this had the benefit of being true. ‘And I don’t think I can study in there,’ I said, gesturing to Cathy’s bedroom. ‘It’s all a bit close. So I think perhaps I’ll have to leave.’

  Bette looked panicked. ‘Oh! Well, then, Hessel, maybe we should let her use it. Hessel? She’s already been in there and it was fine. If she stayed downstairs . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Hessel.

  ‘But I could totally stay downstairs, Hessel. Nothing simpler. Why would I want to go upstairs? What’s so good about upstairs anyway? And I’m not talking about sleeping over there. Just studying. Just a desk. Just daytime.’

  The two of them exchanged a glance.

  ‘I won’t go up the stairs. I promise I won’t.’

  ‘Hessel?’ said Bette. ‘Can she? Please?’

  Hessel looked at his wife. He sighed. ‘Bette would very much like you to stay,’ he said. ‘Just don’t go up the stairs, not even one or two. It’s not safe. And also, upstairs there are very angry possums, running about, banging things, and if you go up there they will eat you. You think I am not serious? I am very serious, Anna. Well, about the stairs I am very serious. Can we trust you?’

  I couldn’t tell you what came over me then – I felt pulled back from a precipice and overcome with gratitude. I threw my arms around Hessel’s neck and kissed his sagging spiky cheek. ‘Of course you can trust me! Thank you, Grandpa. Thank you!’

  ‘Hessel,’ he corrected, and then he brightened as he
said, ‘And I think there’s even an old table over there that you can use.’ I said nothing and kissed his prickly cheek again.

  And when Bette said, ‘It’ll be so nice for the old house to have someone else to appreciate it,’ I turned and hugged and kissed her too.

  And then straight away I started gathering my things.

  I found a box and filled it with my laptop and tablet and books and carried it all across the gravel patch.

  In the entrance hall of the old house, broken glass crunched under my shoes, but the sunlit room felt like a different place altogether. I dropped the mattress to the floor. Dust whooshed away underneath it, but the mattress itself was relatively clean.

  I would need a chair. And a lamp. And a power board. And an extension lead, to reach the power outlet across the room – seemingly the only step Hessel had managed of the grand restoration he had planned. I ran back to fetch the chair from the little bedroom and – again at the last moment – my memento mori. The skulls grinned all the way across the gravel yard, riding on the chair and surveying the grey sky above us as we travelled.

  The table needed a bit of repositioning. As I dragged it across the floor it hummed and rattled and shook, gathering vibrations from the wooden boards and turning them into table-shaped sound. And when the sound stopped I became suddenly aware of the expanse of the house, of the unseen upstairs, of the empty rooms up there and the way my table-dragging sound must have been filling them.

  On my last trip back to the little house to fetch a jug of water and a glass, Hessel disappeared and after a moment reappeared from the back of the house with an old copper-coloured bankers lamp.

  ‘You should take this,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Grandpa,’ I said. And when I plugged the lamp in at the back of the room in Bromley Cairn, I flicked the switch and the globe went warmly on and off. It was no chandelier, but it filled me with happiness.

  And suddenly, finally, there was the feeling I’d been waiting for.

  Here wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t. The comfortable rambling farmhouse, the trees and hills and meandering tracks and gentle country walks of my fantasy escape . . . they were somewhere else, somewhere far away, probably in a BBC drama. But that didn’t matter. That was irrelevant. Everything I needed was here. I had time and space and quiet and people who didn’t mind having me around. I’d been accepted, as far as I could tell. In fact, I belonged. That was the feeling I’d been waiting for. Rightness. Acceptance. Belonging.

  The old house creaked and shifted and then settled again. I stood in front of the table and looked out through the window. A sparrow pecked at a seed in the grass and then leapt into a shrivelled boxthorn, making it shake. Across the yard the other little house caught the last rays of the sun, and suddenly seemed so far away.

  17

  The next morning I was up with the sparrows and over at the miracle that was Bromley Cairn. And in the morning light, the room certainly seemed miraculous, the shape it was in, compared to the rest of the house. Hessel had been right about the stairs. There was no way I was going to venture up them. The banister hung at a strange angle away from the steps, and the bottom of one of the posts was visibly crumbling. In the dim light beyond the hall was the open entrance to a dilapidated room – broken floorboards, a strange little alcove with kitchen tiles flaking away from the wall.

  But my room (this was how I was already thinking about it – my room) was golden and quiet.

  I had checked the bus timetable and there was time for four hours of study before I would go to pick up my package. I could buy an extension lead and a power board while I was in town. I would also buy, as a little house-warming present to Bette and Hessel and to celebrate my coming to stay, an absolute shit-tonne of mouse traps.

  And I studied. For the first time since the mad dash, two days ago, I was again in control of my own mind, my own space. I would have even put up my memento mori if I could have seen a place to hang it. But the big stone walls had no studs to drive a nail into, and at even the mildest touch of my fingertips the ancient plaster caked off in fist-sized chunks. I leaned the memento mori under the mantle of the empty fireplace on the far wall of the room and, even just leaning there, the picture looked at home. There, in front of the fireplace and the stone wall, it was as though it finally courted the grandeur it had always craved.

  But it was good – I may have been tempted to treat hanging the memento mori as a project had it not seemed impossible: as it was, with only a chair, a table, and enough light from the window, all I could do was study. And by the time three hours had passed, I felt my brain was fat with information and the mastery of concepts. For the first time in days I felt in control.

  Bette appeared suddenly in the doorway and told me that it was time for coffee in the Dutch Room.

  Coffee. Of course. I had completely forgotten.

  Bette turned tail quickly and headed back across the gravel in her apron, with her long sleeves drawn down over her bandaged arm. I reluctantly turned away from my desk. I arranged my things before leaving – I always liked to arrange my desk just so for the future-me who would be sitting here again – and as I did, I was interrupted by a creaking sound upstairs. I angled my head and listened for it to come again, and there it was, a high-pitched woody creak, followed by a lower creak, coming from one of the upstairs rooms far across the other side of the house.

  The house. The voice of the house. That, or a possum. Or one of Basil’s ghosts.

  I smiled at the thought and then whatever it was gave a great thump and I yelped and jumped up in my seat.

  Calm down, Anna. Hessel was right – that possum sounded angry. I would really have to get used to being alone in an old and chatty and possumy house if I was going to be able to do this. And I had to be able to do this.

  Over at the little house Bette ushered me inside. ‘Quick,’ she said, waving me towards the unopened double doors. ‘Hessel will be along, but hurry, hurry, because coffee is being served.’

  This is what Bette said, ‘Coffee is being served’, rather than simply acknowledging, as was absolutely apparent to me, that Bette herself had laboured in the kitchen while I studied and Hessel tended to his horse, to polish the silver tray which now stood on the kitchen table, wash the special jug and cups and saucers which stood glistening on the tray, and to bake, too – I could smell it. ‘Gevulde koeken,’ Bette said. Little Dutch specialties that she hoped I would like, even though they probably weren’t that good because Bette wasn’t in fact Dutch like Hessel and me, but that she baked anyway because Hessel wouldn’t eat any treats from the supermarket, Dutch or otherwise, and eleven o’clock weekly coffee had to have Dutch treats.

  ‘But your arm –’ I said.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, and then with a smirk, ‘I make extra and freeze them and then just reheat them in the oven. Don’t tell Hessel.’ She turned me towards the double doors of Dutchness, as Basil had called them. ‘Now, go on, go on,’ she said.

  The doors themselves were dark wood, fairly plain but stylishly finished. European deco. Now that I looked properly, I realised these doors had clearly been brought from somewhere else to fill an open space. This part of the house was obviously supposed to be more open plan, and that little television alcove off the kitchen was just a poor remainder of what should have been an open kitchen, dining and lounge area. But instead this wall had been installed, and the double doors too, to make another room. A private retreat.

  I reached out and turned one of the two bronzed-metal oval handles. The door swung inwards.

  The room was softly lit by two standard lamps, and two small dark leather couches sat either side of a low coffee table. Bigger than the kitchen and Cathy’s room and the alcove put together, the room was actually still quite small, despite the grand entrance. The small couches and coffee table took up most of the room, and above them on the far wall was the window with its curtains open, looking out over the plains, away from everything: away from the ro
ad, the old house, the cairn. It was just a view of ground and sky, and far in the distance, a curving belt of trees.

  Behind one couch was a fireplace with a dark wood mantelpiece – at just enough distance to prevent scorching the leather – and along the other wall, behind the other chair, was a row of low shelves hemming a small piano into the corner. The walls were crammed with pictures, and the bookshelf with art books: The Dutch Masters; Vermeer; Dutch Masters at Work at Home.

  The art on the walls featured light-cast faces, real and pleasant, against shadowy domestic backgrounds. Stepping into this dark room of light figures was like entering a room full of actual people, people who looked as if they might speak to you if you spoke first, perhaps offer you a piece of fruit, or a glass of wine from the jug on the shadowy shelf behind them. People who might actually laugh if you said something funny. The people were real, beautiful, but in an ordinary sort of way. I liked the pictures. I liked them a lot.

  The mantelpiece held china statuettes and tableware in blue and white, the same subjects as the paintings, hand-painted scenes of windmills and women in clogs. It was a very Dutch room. ‘The lair of His Royal Dutchness.’

  But the most striking thing about the room was that it was pristine. The clutter that filled the rest of the house, that washed up in drifts against doorways and under windows, was absent. The Dutch Room was immaculate, as if it were waiting for some very important people. In fact, it was as if the kitchen was the servants’ quarters, and this one room was the room reserved for the masters of the house.

  It didn’t take long after Hessel arrived, dressed in a clean shirt with his hair brushed, for me to realise that coffee in the Dutch Room was mostly just an opportunity for Hessel to relive happy memories of his wayward youth in Holland. I wondered who else he had invited to sit on this snapping polished sofa and regale in this way. Enough people for Basil to know it was a thing. Half the town over the years, probably.