Interzone #266 - September-October 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  Alasdair had stared at the empty window where Una had fallen. He could hear Linda Potterton screaming behind him, but he felt numb and disconnected because there was nothing else he could do other than find a way to navigate the hole which had opened up in his world. If he had pushed Cara out the way, he could have helped Una immediately. If only he hadn’t been so patient and polite, his wife would have been standing there with him. He shook the thought out of his head. There was no time for such speculation, the street wasn’t done with them yet. It occurred to him that he’d left his watch on the small table beside the sofa in Carla Bretton’s front room. It had started to worry at him of late, his wrist coming out in a rash where the leather of the strap rubbed against the softening folds of his skin. But Una had given it to him the Christmas after they married and in some ways it was reassuring that she was there looking after it for him.

  He retreated back up the path and put his hand on Linda Potterton’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, emphasising the word home in a way that made it sound as inclusive as Una would have wanted. Linda nodded. She would be strong for her daughter, but there would be time for that later. For the moment, she was unashamed to be led.

  They walked a few steps up the path before Alasdair turned back. “Carla,” he said. “There’s room at ours should you need it.”

  Carla was standing on her lawn, staring at her broken house. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to do, or what to say.

  ***

  Number 4 and Number 6

  Three more weeks passed before any more houses on the street became unliveable, and when they turned, two did so within hours of each other. At number four, Judy Khamen woke in the night, untroubled by dreams. Lying alone in her dark bedroom with only the memory of the woman she had once loved keeping the bed warm beside her, she felt a knot of cold panic ripen inside of her, and for a moment she wondered if Francesca had come back while she’d been asleep. If she turned her head just a little, taking her eyes off the ceiling and looking at the pillow beside her, she imagined she would see Francesca there, her hair a comb of richer shadows spilling down the back of her neck to pool on the silk sheets.

  Judy was a personal injury lawyer and only the previous week she had been delivering a series of presentations to a handful of financial companies in Midholme, detailing her company’s position on the merits of liabilities insurance. Francesca had been a liability and Judy had known that when she first met her. She’d heard people describe how someone’s smile could be wicked, but she’d never seen such a thing until she’d met Francesca. And there it was: a shard of something mischievous in her eye that widened into something beautiful and dangerous when she smiled.

  Judy was already in a relationship at the time. Marjorie was an older woman and they’d fallen in together by one of those happy accidents where people who fit together find themselves in the right place at the right time. She was a pleasant soul. Homely. They’d been together for the best part of three years, and while their definition of ‘best part’ didn’t quite align (for Judy it was duration, for Marjorie it was quality), Judy had found herself content.

  Francesca really didn’t give a fuck.

  Weeks later when they met again, Judy recounted how her world had since fallen apart now that Francesca was in its orbit. She told how Marjorie had fled. She told Francesca the things Marjorie had said to her, how her face had looked ruined, painted bright with anger and tears. She told Francesca how everything now felt hollow and empty.

  Francesca looked at her pointedly.

  “I will break your heart,” she had said.

  Judy weighed up the risks then bet everything she had, starting with a kiss.

  Lying alone in her bed at number four Hope Street, watching the darkness clot around her, she considered staying where she was and letting the dying house take her with it. It had been months since she’d last seen Francesca and everything she owned now felt brittle and grey, whether the house was liveable or otherwise. Why should she save herself? What was left to be saved?

  But she pushed herself up and out of bed anyway. Sitting on the edge for a moment, her toes arched down to the bare floorboards. She allowed herself the luxury of time to wake up. If the house took her, then so be it. She was in no rush. She took her time finding some clothes to wear, a warm coat, a few paperbacks, some boots. Her hand passed over a locket that Marjorie had given her one Christmas, but she left it where it lay on the dresser. She found her phone and her wallet instead, she found the phone charger and put everything into a canvas bag, one of the ones she had picked up at a conference a few years earlier. She trudged down the stairs, imagining the wallpaper rotting and blackening behind her as she laid her hand on the door handle and turned.

  ***

  Just over an hour after Judy Khamen locked the door of number four behind her for the very last time, Brandon Vine, who was renting the house at number six, woke briefly in his bed in a similar state of distress.

  In his barely awake state, it didn’t occur to him that his panic was anything to do with the house at all. He attributed his fear to the usual things that woke him up in the night. The upcoming round of redundancies at the consultancy firm he’d been working at for the past seven years, the fact that he was ill-prepared to complete his tax assessment this year, the sheer volume of grey in his beard, the nagging sense that there might be a lump on one of his balls even though he wasn’t sure what to look for, the sinking pit of knowing that he had now been single for four years, seven months, three days.

  These were familiar fears, each of which had woken him periodically in the past. On this occasion, as on any other when they had troubled him, he stomped out of his bedroom and crossed the hall to the bathroom where he dosed himself with the homeopathic anxiety medication his mother had sworn by.

  Back in bed, he fretted briefly that his failure to believe in homeopathy would render the tablets redundant, but this worry didn’t stop him from falling back asleep again, and for the first time since he’d been a child, he snored.

  The expression of sheer contentment on his face when he died might have been read as evidence that he knew his concerns would never bother him again.

  ***

  An Invitation

  As Christmas approached, there were only three houses left in Hope Street that had not yet become unliveable, they stood out like pools of bright sunlight punctuating an otherwise unpromising day. The residents who had outlived their homes’ decline remained in the street, clustered together, their shared survival granting them a collective experience more profound than any number of residents committees or contrived community events. For the first time they recognised how they were all alive, how they were all human, how they were all still there. For the first time, they recognised how important the simple commonalities were between them. Simple but vital, they were precious hand and footholds in each other that they each clung to desperately.

  Alasdair Felton was still at number seven and he had taken it upon himself to continue Una’s charity as she would have done herself were she still there. If this was her legacy, he was grateful for it. The house would have been empty if he were there on his own without her, it would have become unliveable in its own very particular and equally dangerous way. Instead, he busied himself with the needs of his guests, considering ways to break the house further into tiny domestic polities which could accommodate more refugees should the need arise.

  Linda Potterton and Monica still lived in the small spare room in the attic, and they filled the space Lewis had left with a memory of him which gave him a greater stature than he could have ever occupied in life. Downstairs, Carla Bretton had claimed a curtained off section of the lounge, and made herself a nest of scatter cushions and blankets in one of the box-beds Alasdair had constructed. The result had the appearance of part Bedouin tent, part Scottish bothy and part child’s den. There was something transitory about it which appealed to her, and in a peculiar w
ay she felt as though she had become the eccentric gypsy seer she had always imagined herself as being.

  Bryn Purbrick had moved into Suzie’s old room, which hadn’t been redecorated properly since the mid-nineties because Una had desperately hoped she would come home one day and because she was terrified she would leave again if the room hadn’t been exactly as she’d left it. One wall was still covered with a collage of curling clippings from the NME and Melody Maker and Rolling Stone and Select. The Khol-rimmed eyes of minor starlets peeked out between demo reviews and interviews with musicians, heavy on supercilious snark and wretched word play. When Bryn woke in panic during the night, when his simple dreams would be invaded by the more nightmarish truth that Graham had died, he would calm himself by picking his way through the clippings with a torch. He didn’t really know what any of it meant, he didn’t know who any of these people were, but in a curious way, it grounded him, it kept him whole.

  At number nine, Penny Moon now hosted Milton Bream in her own room, and Judy Khamen in her father’s. Stephen and Deirdre Spiller and their three kids had also moved in from number ten. They had missed much of the previous activity on the street, they’d been in Portland for the past six months where Deirdre had been working on a project and Stephen had been failing to write a novel. They returned to find their home had become unliveable while they were away. Only two days before they got there, they were told. Penny Moon had already left a note in their driveway, wrapped in plastic and set in place with a hefty pebble.

  There’s a room for you all at ours, it said.

  You’re not alone, it said.

  And so the Spillers had moved into Penny Moon’s upstairs lounge, and being of similar dimensions to the condo they had shared for the past six months, it curiously felt more like home to them than the house they would never enter again.

  Throughout all of this, the Dormer family at number twelve remained on their own.

  “We simply haven’t got the room,” Daniel said when Alasdair brought up the subject one afternoon.

  He’d come round to invite the family to a Christmas meal with the other residents. It had been Monica’s idea. She’d raised it over breakfast one morning the previous week, idly trying to imagine how Christmas might work now that everyone was in different places. She worded things delicately so as not to upset her mother.

  “This place is too small for us really,” Daniel said. He spread his arms to encompass the lounge. “And Hilary suffers from terrible claustrophobia. It’s a family thing. My father was exactly the same.”

  Hilary ducked behind his mother’s legs, his eyes downcast.

  Alasdair nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I really do.”

  He didn’t mention that all the houses in the street were built to the same design, and that while many had subsequently acquired alterations of some description, none were quite so large as the extension which stretched out into what had once been the Dormers’ back garden. Thirty square metres of additional lounge space on the downstairs, two more bedrooms up top.

  Alasdair inclined his head. He had said his piece, he wasn’t going to force the issue.

  At the door, Daniel watched his neighbour walk down the path.

  “I don’t know why they stay,” he said.

  Alasdair stopped and turned back. He looked at Daniel a moment, trying to see the same hand and footholds on him which were so clear and apparent in everyone else on the street. But the man was smooth and soft, like a curl of butter on a warm day.

  “It’s their home,” Alasdair said. “Why should they leave?”

  “It’s not their home anymore.” Daniel looked imperious in the doorway. Part sentry, part bouncer. “Circumstance might be unkind, but there’s nothing anyone can do when it gets in your way. It’s a message. We should listen. We all should listen. It started with the Pottertons. Maybe because they stayed, it’s still happening.”

  Alasdair shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe that at all.”

  Daniel remained unmoved. “Well, it’s something to consider.” He plunged his hands deep into his pockets and looked up at the threads of cloud crawling across the grey of the sky. “And if it’s true,” he said, “perhaps your wife’s compassion has put everyone at risk. If the Pottertons had been sent packing when their house went wrong, who knows how many people would still be alive?”

  When he looked down again, his smile was stiff and straight.

  “Christmas dinner will be at two,” Alasdair said. “You’re all welcome. Bring a bottle if you can spare one.”

  ***

  Number 9

  Late on Christmas Eve, Penny Moon’s house at number nine became unliveable. Judy Khamen noticed the signs first. It was nearly nine o’clock and she was in the back garden with a cigarette. She found herself strangely content with her new life. She had always liked Penny, but even Milton was less of a dick than she had assumed. She liked the closeness of the situation. The warmth, the tolerance, the fact you had to lean into the wall to let people past in the morning. If it was not the companionship she had wept for, perhaps it was the companionship she had needed.

  With her back to the house, she felt a growing heat at the nape of her neck which had no business being there so late in the year.

  The others were still in the house, watching a DVD in the front room. A stand-up comedy routine that Judy had seen before. The volume was turned up high, and she could hear the din of distant laughter, echoed by intermittent barks of amusement from Milton and Stephen, yaps from the kids. When she tried the back door she realised it had locked behind her. Penny didn’t have enough keys to go round, so the doors were kept on latches and sometimes they slipped. Sometimes they locked themselves when they were closed too forcefully. Sometimes.

  Judy hammered on the glass but no-one came. She knocked louder and shouted herself hoarse, but the tinny roar of laughter from the television turned mocking and cruel. She searched the garden for something to wield at one of the windows, perhaps even to break it if she could, but Penny’s garden was wild and untended, filled only with limp knotty grasses and soft muddy boles.

  There was no footpath through to the front of the house, so Judy took a different approach. She jogged up the garden as far as it went and clambered over the wall to the garden next door. Milton Bream’s house glowered at her with black and empty windows, but its toxicity had yet to consume the garden as well and Judy passed through it unharmed.

  Over the next wall, in the garden of number seven, Judy found Bryn Purbrick playing swing ball with Monica Potterton. Both were wearing head torches, making the ball flit in and out of the skittering light as though it was a planet ducking in and out of eclipse. She hurried past them into the kitchen where Alasdair and Carla were dressing the turkey.

  “Penny’s house is going,” she said breathless. “Penny’s house is near as gone.”

  What happened next happened briskly and without discussion. Just as all those months earlier, the Potterton family knew to leave their house as one, so too did the new and expanded Felton household understand how they needed to act. The meal was abandoned, the house was emptied and everyone fled up the street to Penny Moon’s house.

  Nobody on Hope Street died on Christmas Eve. The Felton household ran shouting and waving and the Moon household didn’t need any other cue to understand their situation. This was a matter beyond language. This was a matter beyond explanation. They fled the house at number nine without further hesitation or thought. They ran down the path into the arms of their waiting neighbours, looking back only to see how the house they had lived in had dimmed and diminished, retreating into a darkness considerably deeper than the one the evening had painted for it.

  Alasdair looked down the road to see there were lights on in the Dormer house, but no-one came out to see what the commotion was, no curtain twitched to suggest they were watching, no figures lingered in the doorway. He turned away, his inexplicable sadness moderated only a little by the adrenaline
-laced energy of the crowd.

  “What do we do now?” someone said, and someone else laughed darkly.

  “It’s Christmas,” Alasdair said. There was something miraculous in the air after all.

  “That’s tomorrow,” Monica said, but as she spoke the first flakes of the season’s snow began to fall.

  Alasdair shook his head. “Why wait?” he said.

  ***

  An Early Christmas Party

  The Christmas party at number seven Hope Street lasted from the evening of Christmas Eve to the afternoon of Boxing Day.

  There were now twelve guests staying in the house at number seven and with a little imagination, Alasdair found room for them all. Packing them into the corners of his house as though he was capable of tucking them away safely, as though he was strategising some inexplicable game of hide and seek with whatever darkness it was that pursued them from door-to-door.

  Instinctively, his guests understood all too well that if time was not on their side, they should – for the first time in their lives – do the things they wanted to do, when they wanted to. There was an inescapable sense that their lives had shifted into a higher gear. They could see their future written in the shadows of the empty houses on the street and they knew there was little sense in sitting back and waiting for it to catch up with them.

  There would be a Christmas that year in Hope Street, no matter what happened, no matter what it represented. It would be both spiritual and secular, and in its own peculiar way it would be an act of rebellion. Because even joy and companionship could be subversive under the right conditions.