Even without his eyeglass, his expression was pointed.
'Is that why you want rid of it?' he said.
'No.' I shook my head. 'Of course not.'
The man slammed the roller door down and the van bounced on its suspension.
'We'll take good care of it,' he said.
*
Louise picked a rich ochre and the following weekend, we started painting the attic. Louise wore one of my old work shirts. We'd both got bigger since I last wore it and it barely stretched to cover her.
Between coats, we sat on the floor of the empty room and shared a pot of coffee. The window was open and a cool breeze made the bare light-bulb swing in circles.
'It's such a beautiful room,' Louise said.
She was right, of course. The model had shrunken and diminished it. In its absence, the room felt airy and pleasant.
Louise told me about the furniture she wanted and how she would arrange it. She told me about a picture she had seen which would look just right on the far wall. I let her talk and pushed myself to my feet to look out of the window.
In a small crack between the wooden floorboards and the wall, something caught my eye and I crouched to retrieve it. It was a figurine from the model, shaken loose and forgotten during the move: the woman from the bridge, posture bent to consider the water beneath her. Shorn of context and alone in the palm of my hand she looked stooped and sad.
'What is it?' Louise said, standing up carefully and stretching. Her hands pressed against her kidneys.
I slipped the figurine into my pocket.
'It's nothing,' I said. 'It's rubbish.'
She joined me at the window and I put my arm around her. The town spread beneath us, hugging the banks of the river, warmed and golden in the early evening sun. It was vivid and alive with a distant buzz of day-to-day activity.
Louise tilted her head, resting it on my shoulder.
'You can see the bridge from here,' she said.
The End of Hope Street
Number Five
The Potterton house became unlivable at a quarter past three on Saturday afternoon. Lewis Potterton had been sitting in the lounge reading the business section of the Daily Telegraph when he first saw the symptoms, but when he got to the hallway to call his wife and daughter, he saw they were already hurrying downstairs, his wife Lydia fresh from the shower and still wrapped in a towel.
They hesitated, surprised at how, in a moment of bemused concordance, everyone else's actions had mirrored their own. No one spoke, but then no one needed to. It was true that there had been frictions between them over the past few months; Lewis' work had demanded too-long hours of him, Lydia appeared helpless under threat of redundancy, and Monica had felt ignored by the both of them. But standing there together in the hallway, there was an unshakable sense that the connection between them ran deeper and stronger than any of them had previously anticipated. In that one, precious moment, they were still and hyper aware, listening to the sounds of the house settling, sounds that only the previous day had been normal and reassuring.
Then, as one, they made for the front door and let themselves out, hiding their haste from one another until they were safely together on the front lawn where they stopped and looked back at the house that Lydia and Lewis had lived in since they had married fifteen years earlier, the house that Monica had known all of her life.
It was a bright sunny afternoon, and Lewis was struck by all the times he had woken in the night, fretting about what he should rescue in the event of a fire: the laptop, the accounts, the family photographs. He'd had a plan for them once, but he knew now that the most important parts of his life were there with him. His wife, his twelve-year-old daughter, his health so he could take care of them. Everything else was as good as gone now, locked and lost inside the house they would never enter again, and at that moment he really didn't care anymore.
*
It was the Feltons who took the family in. They lived two doors down at number seven and on that particular afternoon, Una Felton had been putting the recycling out early, which she did every weekend. She saw the Pottertons standing together on their front lawn. She saw how the father (Louis? Larry?) stood with his arms around his wife and daughter, she saw how all three of them stared at the house they had lived in, and she recognised the look of sadness and pride in their expressions.
She'd been unhappy when the couple had first moved to Hope Street. How long had that been now? She remembered them driving up to view the property in that ridiculous red sports car. He had a pony tail then and she tottered on heels across the lawn. Hidden behind the net curtain in the lounge at number seven, Una had listened to their unguarded enthusiasm and assumed the worst. They were young, she'd thought. They were loud and vulgar. Maybe they'd come armed with the means to lower the tone and the price of the neighbourhood.
With hindsight, it had been a rather un-Christian assessment but when she saw them looking so lost in their front garden, her heart went out to them completely. How could it not? The wife (Linda?) was only wearing a towel – the poor thing – but all three of them looked vulnerable. They were a nice family, she decided. And she decided that she'd always thought so.
She unpeeled her gardening gloves and joined them on the lawn, looking up at the new veneer of darkness their house wore.
'Oh good heavens,' she said, her sincerity genuine. 'Come with me, let's keep you warm. Let's see what we can do.'
They exchanged glances with each other before they followed her, and they saw in each other the same feeling of being lost they felt themselves. They joined hands and followed Una back up the path to the pavement and along the road, past the untidy lawn of number six to the pristine one at number seven.
In the lounge, sitting on his favourite armchair, Alasdair Felton looked up from his newspaper, surprised to see his wife bringing guests back into the house without having organised a concerted campaign to make it look a fraction tidier than it already was. Una ignored him – she often did when she had something more pressing on her mind – so he watched and smiled as she fussed around, her frown of concern masking an irrepressible enthusiasm for her newfound purpose.
'Let me see if I can find you something to wear,' Una Felton said to Lydia, looking her up and down. 'My daughter, Suzie, still has clothes here. They're old, she hasn't been home in so long. But she's a big girl, too. Healthy.' She disappeared upstairs, leaving the family slightly shell-shocked.
Lewis Potterton noticed Alasdair sitting, watching them and nodded to him in wordless acknowledgement. He still held his wife by one hand, his daughter by the other, but in his expression, Alasdair saw a man who was being held. A look of weightless panic behind his eyes, grounded only by those around him.
Alasdair nodded back. His smile, he hoped, was an encouraging one. He pushed himself to his feet.
'I was going to make some tea,' he said. 'I'll use the large teapot.'
He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, still oblivious of the purpose behind the Potterton's visit. He knew his part was to simply act as host for as long as it took.
It took longer than anyone anticipated. The Pottertons squeezed into the Feltons' spare room, the neat little loft conversion Una had thought to use as an art room, had she ever found the time. There were other rooms, bigger ones, but the closeness of the space under the eaves felt more important to them. They unfolded the futon and spread out an inflatable mattress so they could all stay together.
In the master bedroom on the floor below, Alasdair Felton sat down beside his wife, who looked tired but flushed with the day's charity. She had reclothed them all and put the washing machine on. She had fed them and kept them warm, and now, although tired, she seemed to hum with a bristling energy he remembered from Suzie's childhood. He took her hand and he smiled at her like he hadn't done for years.
'What a beautiful thing you are,' he said.
Number Eight
The second house to become unlivable was number eight.
Milton Bream had not been home since his divorce from Jemima had finally reached its conclusion at the magistrates' court earlier in the week. When he pulled up in front of the house, he knew it was the only thing he had left in the world and for a precious, fleeting moment, he felt as though all the screaming and shouting and tears and grief had been worth it after all.
His lawyers had spoken to Jemima's lawyers and, after much back and forth, they had agreed that, despite everything, she should be free to go home 'one last time' to pick up her belongings. Brimbley, his solicitor, had advised Milton he should go home first and put away anything of value, but Milton wasn't interested. He just wanted the whole thing over and done with and he wasn't sure he would want to keep anything that Jemima had set her sights on anyway. He knew from experience how her glassy-eyed desire had the power to corrupt anything in its path.
Standing outside the front door for the first time in just under a year, Milton was under no illusion that there would be anything of value left behind. Certainly not his collection of first edition Harry Potter books he had diligently collected and shrink-wrapped for posterity. Certainly not the binders of first-day covers his uncle had left him in his will. Certainly not those gold and ivory cufflinks his grandfather had worn when he got married.
Jemima knew where all the treasure was in the house; he imagined her with pirate maps, digging through the attic detritus in her quest to exhume it all. He imagined too how that dipshit Welsh oaf, Barri-with-an-i, would have been waiting with his van in the drive, rubbing his fat steak-like hands in drooling anticipation of a wealth beyond his meagre, stunted dreams.
It was something of a surprise, therefore, to see the curtains still hung in the margins of the lounge windows, and when Milton squinted through the glass, he could make out the obsidian slab of the plasma TV still mounted on the wall above the fireplace, and the glittering stack of his precious hi-fi neatly embedded on the shelves.
Maybe they didn't have the tools to take them down? He wouldn't have put it past them to act on spite alone and break everything instead.
With a sigh, he set his key to the lock and only then did he stop, sensing a thick pressure on his chest, a heat behind the ears. He had been so preoccupied with Jemima he almost hadn't noticed the house had become unlivable in his absence. The irony of this was not lost on him. Thinking of Jemima at the wrong time had led to his first divorce after all; thinking of Jemima had been what had driven him to go home that lunchtime to find her in bed with Barri-with-an-i, who she hadn't seen since they'd been at school together in Swansea, and for whom she'd always harboured feelings – even though his middle-aged form was somewhat less athletic than the one she'd lost her virginity to all those years before.
And now, thinking of Jemima had almost made him walk blindly into an unlivable house. He barked a laugh, an ugly sound even to him, and backed away down the path, staring up at the dead façade in front of him. So hard fought for, so easily lost. He sat on the edge of the rockery and cried for the first time since he was eight years old.
*
Milton Bream was rescued from his doorstep by Penny Moon from number nine. Like Una Felton, she took him home and took care of him, and like the Potterton family, Milton accepted her charity with a grace and humility that was new to him, but which he found fitted him well.
Penny Moon was nearly ten years Milton's junior but knew exactly what it was like to lose someone you loved to another. She had moved into Hope Street six years earlier to care for her father after a stroke had rendered him housebound. She had set up a bedroom downstairs where the lounge used to be, opening the curtains wide each morning so her father could see the birds feeding in his beloved garden.
While he slept during the day, Penny had worked hard, making the upstairs rooms of number nine into the apartment she had once thought to have bought with Gary. She pictured a lounge, a bedroom, and spaces for all her books and the paintings she imagined she might one day buy. She made the upstairs rooms into a little box for herself, a nest with four walls and a door she could use to shut herself in. It was a long way away from her friends in London, but they had been Gary's friends too and she simply didn't trust them any more. All their concern and advice seemed more for his benefit than hers, so she stopped replying to their messages and answering their calls. Another door left to shut on its own.
After her father died, she inherited the house but remained upstairs. The rooms downstairs felt both too dark and too bright at the same time. The barbed smell of her father's final, humiliating hours lingered in the dark patches on the ceiling, in the gaps in the wallpaper, the scuff marks on the floor. She sat upstairs alone in the bedroom she had made a lounge, the curtains closed so she couldn't see the garden her father had spent his life tending, and which had grown wild and unkempt without him.
When Milton moved in, he knew nothing of her history and, in those early days, he didn't think to ask. When she showed him her father's room, he didn't see the history of it, scribbled into the walls and the furniture. He just saw a sanctuary, illuminated by the sort of diligent love he had no experience of himself.
He followed Penny, docile and silent as she led him to the kitchen and made him a bowl of soup and still-warm soda bread, the same meal her father used to make her when she had been a child.
Number Eleven
Less than a week after Milton Bream's house became unlivable, the same happened to the house at number eleven.
This house was owned by Marlon Swick, and he lived there with his partner of eight years, Julia Prin. It was another Saturday and they had spent the afternoon at his mother's house in Barnstaple. She spent the whole time they were there talking about children. She'd always wanted grandchildren she'd said, and she'd said it with one of those pointed expressions which was probably supposed to be subtle, but failed.
She'd given up on the two of them getting married by that point, and while both Marlon and Julia had tried to explain to her how they both very much wanted children too, their own subtlety was missed entirely.
And so, while Julia patiently washed the dishes after lunch, Marlon's mother stood close behind her.
'Tick tock,' she said, a benign twinkle in her voice. 'Tick tock.'
They excused themselves from the evening meal which Marlon's mother had lovingly prepared. Marlon lied to her, faking a phone call and explaining something had happened back home which they absolutely had to attend to, and he had looked away while his mother cried. He would call her later on. He always did find it easier to deal with her over the phone.
She shouted at them a little, she screamed a little more. Everyone was miserable by the time they finally left.
On the way home, they stopped at a country pub and ordered the most enormous meal they could afford: three courses, artisan bread, a jug of wine which Julia was too upset to enjoy.
Marlon ran a small office cleaning company from a pair of stacked Portakabins on the south side of Midholme. Business had been slowing since he'd lost out on a few contracts over the last few years, but his mother's influence had left him well versed in the tactic of allaying sadness with food, no matter what the cost.
Back in the car, he turned to Julia and smiled at her in the most encouraging way he knew how.
'When we get home,' he said, 'we should go to the Oak and get drunk like teenagers. We should absolutely make fools of ourselves.'
Julia laughed, but Marlon knew she would probably rather just go to bed and forget the afternoon happened at all.
Unlike Milton Bream's experience, Marlon and Julia knew something was wrong with Hope Street as soon as they turned off the Brenthwaite Road. The whole street felt darker than it should have been, and for a brief moment of intense clarity, Marlon saw how there were three nodes along its length where the night was most clenched and dangerous. One was the Potterton house, one was the Bream house and one was their own.
'Oh, baby,' he said.
Julia was asleep on the passenger seat beside him. He parked by t
he kerb and arranged a coat over her to keep her warm, then sat back beside her, watching the house until dawn.
*
Daniel Dormer lived in number twelve with his wife Kelly and their six-year-old son who, to Kelly's consternation, he had insisted be named after his father, Hilary.
On the morning after Marlon and Julia's house became unlivable, he walked out his front door to greet the morning, as had become his custom of late, and saw his neighbours asleep in their car.
Daniel Dormer had very strong views regarding neighbourhood aesthetics. The cars on Hope Street should, he believed, be parked in the driveways provided, or better still, in the garages provided. He'd heard somewhere that Julia was an artist of some sort and that she and Marlon had converted their garage into a studio. To Daniel, this seemed like a terrible waste of time, more so given that his neighbours' ageing and tatty Volvo estate was just the sort of vehicle that suburban garages had been invented to conceal.
He tapped on the driver's side window, clearing his throat as he mentally prepared himself to make a speech, a speech that would be both reasonable, concise and fair. Churchillian, if you will.
Marlon rolled down the window and nodded at him. Before Daniel could utter a word, Marlon pointed past him to number eleven, which still looked dark in the early morning sun.
'The house has gone wrong,' he said. 'We can't go home.'
Daniel had heard about the Potterton house, of course. He'd also heard about Milton Bream. But his own house at number twelve was the closest to the junction with the Brenthwaite Road, and Daniel had little reason to traverse Hope Street to its far end, so he'd never actually seen how the houses could change so utterly.
Seeing the shadows that overcast number eleven, he was stuck with a stark and inexplicable sense of horror. Objectively, the house looked little different; its window frames were still in need of repainting and the lawn was rough and overgrown. But there was something else about the house which felt wrong to him, a deep almost-imperceptible vibration that made his blood worry, and his bones scrape inside of him.
You Will Grow Into Them Page 23
