The Pre-War House and Other Stories

by Alison Moore

  I swear I can smell the barberry bush and the wild flowers, the weeds, all the way from the end of the garden.

  From time to time, my father found my sister loitering in the town centre with her friends, with boys, during the day, during the week, when she should have been at school or coming home. What was she doing, he wanted to know, hanging about in the street like a stray cat, with all these randy toms sniffing around her. Well what was he doing there, she said, spying on her, bothering her, when he should have been at work. And what’s more he stank, she said, he reeked.

  He tried to keep her in the house in the evenings, but he couldn’t make her stay; she kept slipping away.

  He smelt the smoke on her breath and in our bedroom. He found dog-ends in her pockets. Well, what was he doing looking, she asked; what was he doing going through her pockets; what was he doing in her bedroom? What had she been doing, he replied, in his bedroom? She smoked in the house and in the street, and she looked, said our father, like a slut.

  They sat across the kitchen table from one another, my father and my sister. Every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner, my father sat opposite my sister and saw my mother glaring at him through my sister’s cold blue eyes. He saw Barbara twenty years younger, before us, before him; he saw Barbara with her good figure and the bad skin of her adolescence; he saw Barbara in her youth, stinking of smoke and going with boys and telling him to go to hell.

  He washed out her filthy mouth with tar soap, with his hand squeezing the back of her neck, holding her hard, pushing her head forward over the sink. The smell of that tar soap was like tasting it, that thick, burnt smell in my nostrils, in my throat, in my stomach. And when he let her go, or when she struggled free, there were red marks where he had held her, the imprints of his fingers on her skin.

  Sometimes, when I try to picture my sister, when I try to see her face, all I can see is those cold, blue eyes. And sometimes I don’t see her face at all – I see her lying on her side, turned to the wall, the blood vessels in her neck broken.

  My father cleaned his car as fastidiously as he cleaned the house. His car was gunmetal grey, with immaculate bodywork which he washed every week in the driveway, chasing away the warm, dirty suds with cold, clean water, chasing them over the roof and the bonnet and down the sides of the car, down the driveway, over the pavement, into the gutter and down the drain. He cleaned the inside of the car, polishing the dashboard and the windscreen and the mirrors, and hoovering the carpeting and the upholstery, pushing the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner into the corners and crannies and sucking out the dirt, and taking out the odd empty bottle which rolled about under his seat, on the floor of his clean car, and putting it in the dustbin.

  There was often a bottle or two under the sink, with the cleaning products, behind the bleach.

  There were bottles in the garden shed. We were not allowed to go in my father’s shed, but I did. Inside, his garden tools hung spick and span from nails on the walls; he always cleaned his tools after using them, and then hung the right tool back up on the right nail. There were magazines, in a neat pile on a high shelf. There was a bicycle, my mother’s old bicycle, dirty and rusting, its tyres deflated, under an old sheet. And there were bottles, half-full or empty, up on the shelf next to the magazines.

  There were bottles in his bedroom, under his bed and on his windowsill, behind the curtain. They rattled when my father moved about at night, trembling on the floorboards and against the cold window.

  My father’s breath over the breakfast table smelt bad, like something dead or dying. It seeped from his skin, that death or dying; it seeped from his pores and from the rims of his discoloured eyes.

  I can see the garden shed from the window of my old bedroom. Even the shed is empty now, everything has been packed up or thrown away. There is ivy, though, growing through the roof, pushing its way beneath the roofing felt and between the planks, pushing through the webs the spiders have made.

  I lay a clean double sheet over the mattress of my old single bed. I haven’t brought a pillow so I use the one I found in my grandmother’s room. Lying down, breathing in, trying to smell a laundry smell, I smell my grandmother, vinegar and dust.

  There are no curtains at the window. I turn on my side and close my eyes. When I open them again, I am aching with hunger, and the moon is a huge, bright hole in the vast, black night, in the sky full of stars and comets and meteors, and the aliens my father always thought were coming.

  I drifted through the long summer, through the unbroken stretch of eventless days. There was no school until September, no holiday by the sea. There was no rain for weeks on end, and the dry grass turned yellow in the parched garden. I slept badly at night; it was close.

  There were men resurfacing the road in front of our house. For weeks the screaming noise of their machinery and their shouting over the noise and the thick smell of hot tarmac filled the still air. They moved slowly up the road in their heavy boots, with their heavy machines, and the road they left behind them was immaculate.

  One morning, when my sister was not at home and my father was out at work, I went to his shed. I touched the tools hanging from nails on the walls, leaving prints on the cleaned and polished metal. I looked at his magazines, at the naked women with their legs wide open. I unscrewed the tops of the half-full and empty bottles and smelt the poisonous fumes which escaped from their necks. The sun beat through the little plastic window into the airless shed, and I felt grubby, my pores full of heat and filth.

  I took the sheet off the bicycle and wheeled it out onto the path. It was a sad thing, a sit-up-and-beg bike with a little bell. I cleaned its dirty frame and inflated its flat tyres and oiled its rusty chain. And then I put it back in the shed, under the sheet.

  Susan was often out of the house, with her friends. Mostly she came home for the dinners our grandmother made, but sometimes she stayed out all night while my father waited for her downstairs.

  And sometimes, Susan stayed home all day with me. We sunbathed on the lawn like two hot cats. We lay on our backs, with the grass and the daisies pressing into our bare skin, and the hot sun pushing down on the lids of our closed eyes.

  ‘Nosema ocularum,’ she said. ‘Lives underground, in the earth, and in hot weather it tunnels up to the surface and jumps in your ear and wriggles into your brain and eats its way out through your eyeballs.’ She poked a blade of grass into my earhole and tickled the little hairs, making me shudder.

  ‘Wohlfahrtia magnifica,’ she said. ‘Lives in your underwear drawer, in your gussets, and when you pull up your pants it crawls up your bumhole and you fart yourself to death.’

  I stand up, and feel the bulging pressure in my abdomen, the weight of the nesting baby and the tensing of my body readying itself. I go to the bathroom, and then lie awake in the small hours listening to the tired pulsing of the old pipes.

  I once flew over Russia, and through the window I thought I saw an endless cloudscape far below, its white streaked with grey, and then realised that it was land, the bleak sprawl of Siberia.

  Sometimes, now, I have trouble sleeping.

  Cerebrum vermiculus. Lives in your brain, and crawls through your eyes, and eats its way through your heart.

  We were sitting on the front wall, baking in the midday sun. We had been there all morning with nothing else to do. The bricks were hot under the palms of my hands and through the seat of my shorts and against my bare heels, which I bounced against the wall, marking time. It was the longest day.

  Susan lit a cigarette, and I imagined the tarry heat filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs. She had another love-bite on her neck, a bruise blooming under her skin.

  I said, ‘I found Mum’s old bike in the shed.’

  Susan said nothing, glanced down at the cigarette burning between her fingers.

  ‘I fixed it up.’

  She shrugged. She turned and
looked down the road, gazing into the empty day, into the heat haze which hovered over the road, buckling the clean lines, shimmering like a desert horizon in a film just before a mirage appears. She sucked at her cigarette, her cheeks hollowing.

  I hopped off the wall and went down by the side of the house into the back garden, over the bone-dry lawn and down the hot brick path to the airless shed, and fetched out my mother’s old bicycle. I wheeled it up to the front of the house and stood it on its stand, the soles of my bare feet cooking on the oily driveway.

  ‘Let’s go for a ride,’ I said. ‘I’ll pedal.’

  Susan looked at the bicycle. I rang the bell and she smiled. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall, flicked the dog-end into the flower bed behind her, and dropped her feet down onto the pavement. ‘Okay,’ she said.

  I held the handlebars and straddled the bike, and she climbed on behind me and held on. I could feel her weight, and wobbled at first, unbalanced. We weaved out of the driveway, the handlebars scraping against the front wall. We bumped down the kerb and onto the melting road. We rode up and down, getting steadier and faster, up and down and turning at each end of the street, arcing through the shimmering horizon, like we were the mirage in the desert, Susan’s summer dress catching the wind we made, baring her pale legs.

  I saw our father’s car turning into the street, the sun’s dazzling glint on its clean bodywork. We were cycling towards the house, unsteadily but still fast enough to make wind, and he was driving towards us, into the sun, which was beating through his shiny windscreen, beating into his red-rimmed eyes, and empty bottles were clinking, rolling around, on the vacuum-cleaned floor of his car.

  For a moment, there was nothing, just the slow, hot day, and the almost empty road, and the sun touching the gleaming bonnet of my father’s car and bouncing off, and then there was a dreadful sound, like something snapping, and the heavy, burnt smell of tar.

  Standing slowly, standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of that endless day, in the middle of that sprawling summer, I saw my sister, lying on her side on the pavement, on the slabs, the swell of blood beneath her skin, her cold, blue eyes turned to the wall.

  My father, out of the car, stood back, his sweat turning cold. The stink of burnt rubber hung in the air. The dark streaks of his tyres stained the brand-new road.

  I touch the scars on the insides of my arms and on my legs, where the tarmac took the skin off, where scabs formed and then peeled away, brown and brittle like dead leaves in the autumn.

  At night, I still find myself frozen in that long moment, that timeless limbo. I still hear that silence, such a silence, and then the snap, the damage.

  I wash my face in the bathroom sink, splashing cold water against my tired skin.

  Every last thing is now packed in the boxes, which are marked up and sealed and ready to go. The cupboards and wardrobes and drawers are empty. The walls are bare. The fridge is switched off, the door ajar. Nothing has been left behind under the dark-wood furniture or the bare-mattressed beds. Everything is clean.

  The things I brought with me are out in my car, ready to go home.

  It is early. Peter won’t be up yet. He will be in our bed, and our bed will be warm, even though it is cold outside.

  There is knocking at the front door, knocking and ringing and voices. From the top of the stairs I can see a figure on the doorstep, the shape fractured by the glass, a head pressing close, hands cupped around the eyes, trying to see through into the naked hallway. The men are here.

  While they empty the house, I take one last walk through the garden, down to the end wall, to the barberry bush.

  I have put in my bag the half-finished knitting I found on my grandmother’s night-stand, the beginnings of a very small jumper made out of the blue wool she unravelled that day in Lent, which I wound into a small, tight ball while she talked.

  ‘When your father met your mother,’ she said, ‘he was engaged to a lovely girl.’

  My mother, at that time, was also spoken for; she had a boyfriend, a good-looking young man with olive skin and oil-black hair and eyebrows which met in the middle. She was eight weeks pregnant, but not yet showing, and she had not yet told anyone, not even her boyfriend, the father.

  That summer, after the trip my father made to Bournemouth for a conference, he took the same coach to the coast and back every few weeks, on his own, just to see my mother, to be handed those warm cups of tea. And half the time the hostess he found on that seaside-bound coach was not my mother, who was on another coach going somewhere else, or she was with her good-looking boyfriend, or not, because he left her when she started to show.

  On the last coach trip he made, my father took his tea from my mother and smiled, and asked her, if she was free, if she would like to, if she had time to look around Bournemouth.

  He left his fiancée and married my mother, who wore white over her bump, and he brought her home, to his mother’s house.

  When the baby was stillborn, my mother dug a small grave at the end of the garden, by the wall, and laid her baby in it, in a shroud at the bottom of that hole, like an egg in a nest. She filled in the hole and planted a barberry bush, and my father clipped and weeded the grassed-over grave and made it neat.

  Now, in the long grass, wild flowers flourish, their roots reaching for those tiny bones. Fly larvae have been nibbling at my father’s vegetables, and beetle larvae have been nibbling at the woodwork, and moth larvae have been nibbling at my grandmother’s clothes, which are inside the boxes being carried through the front door by the men, and I hear the slow ticking, the metronomic clicking, of the hallway clock going by.

  The empty house has a hollow echo. It must be almost as it was when my great-grandmother first walked through the front door, stepping into the hallway of her brand-new pre-war house.

  When the van has left, I lock the front door behind me and walk down the driveway to my car, and the footprints I make are lost amongst all the other footprints, the men’s big bootprints, coming and going in the snow.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to those who have inspired or enabled any part of this collection, whether by making a comment in the pub one night about winking (that’s you, Gillian Collard), by wondering aloud at work about an unresponsive computer (that’s you, Ian Perry), by taking me on an exploration of some woods or recalling a World War Two bomb that fell very close to home (that’s you, Dad), by taking me to India (that’s you, Kevin Ryan), by finding us a holiday apartment with a memorable metal staircase up the outside (that’s you, Dan), by having a passport ‘taken into safe keeping’ whilst working as an au pair (that’s you, Jenny Kennedy), and so on. Thanks to everyone who has supported and encouraged me in many and various ways – family and friends and the editors and publishers who have given my stories their stamp of approval. Special thanks as ever to Nicholas Royle, my highly valued agent and editor, to John Oakey for a handsome and clever cover design, and to Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery at Salt for continuing to be such a pleasure to work with.

  ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’ ©2010 by Alison Moore, originally published as a chapbook (Nightjar Press)

  ‘Humming and Pinging’ ©2000 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Marches Literary Prize Anthology 2000

  ‘The Egg’ ©2011 by Alison Moore, originally published in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press) edited by Nicholas Royle

  ‘Overnight Stop’ ©2013 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Lampeter Review #7

  ‘Glory Hole’ ©2011 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Lightship Anthology: 1

  ‘Nurture’ ©٢٠13 by Alison Moore, original to this collection

  ‘Seclusion’ ©2013 by Alison Moore, originally published online at www.paraxis.org

  ‘Sleeping Under the Stars’ ©2013 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Not
tingham Short Story Anthology 2012

  ‘Jetsam’ ©2013 by Alison Moore, originally published in Ambit #211

  ‘Monsoon Puddles’ ©2004 by Alison Moore, originally published in Quality Women’s Fiction #43

  ‘It Has Happened Before’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published in Shadows & Tall Trees #4

  ‘The Yacht Man’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published in The New Writer #111

  ‘The Machines’ ©٢٠13 by Alison Moore, original to this collection

  ‘Wink Wink’ ©2000 by Alison Moore, originally published in the Creative Writers’ Network magazine, winter 2000

  ‘If There’s Anything Left’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published online at www.theyellowroom-magazine.co.uk

  ‘Static’ ©2009 by Alison Moore, originally published online at www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk

  ‘Sometimes You Think You Are Alone’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Screaming Book of Horror (Screaming Dreams Press) edited by Johnny Mains

  ‘A Small Window’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published in The Warwick Review vol.6 #4

  ‘The Smell of the Slaughterhouse’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published in The New Writer #111

  ‘Helicopter Jean’ ©2002 by Alison Moore, originally published in The New Writer #53

  ‘Small Animals’ ©2012 by Alison Moore, originally published as a chapbook (Nightjar Press)