Open House

by Jane Christmas

  I detect a New Zealand accent. I wonder if she and I will become friends.

  “I am keeping the rusted ones, but you can have this gate.”

  “Sure,” she enthuses.

  The Husband and I carry it toward her. It weighs a ton, and we stumble and struggle to lift it over the boundary wall. Ali makes no attempt to help despite the fact that she is probably a good twenty years younger than either of us.

  As if reading my mind, she says, “I have fibromyalgia. Very limited strength.”

  We manoeuvre it through her yard and position it where she wants it.

  The Husband has a habit of gravitating toward people who are ill and weak. He loves a patient. He asks if there is anything else he can move for her. Suddenly, he is Mr. Handy.

  “Yeah. Can you move that pot for me?”

  While he does that, I apologize about the noise from the renovation.

  “It’s okay. Can imagine there’s a lot to do.”

  “Yes, the house was in pretty bad condition.”

  Ali goes silent; looks at the ground.

  Have I said something wrong? Have I inadvertently injected my standards into the conversation? After all, “bad condition” is a subjective term. I backpedal in an attempt to shift and restore the conversation away from any hint of insult: “It must be strange for you to have new neighbours. Shame about the former owner.”

  She raises her eyes; regards me warily.

  “We understand,” I continue cautiously, glancing at The Husband for support, “that he went into care. Had he been ill for long?”

  Ali’s eyes widen with incredulity. Her face goes scarlet; her voice rears up and explodes in an exhale of frustrated apoplexy as though it has been waiting an age to be released and has finally been granted permission: “Gone into care? Is that what they told you? That he went into care?”

  We tense up and wait for the hammer to fall.

  “He did not go into care. He went to prison!”

  What?

  “He was a nightmare!” Her words now gush forth in a waterfall of anger. “A major druggie. He’d have parties lasting three days. Loud music at all hours of the day and night. People coming and going. Police raids. It’s been awful.”

  The Husband and I let that sink in as the dozen ephemeral pieces flutter into place: the imprint of a battering ram on the front door; the disturbed, careless atmosphere of the house; why nothing has been maintained; the strange locks on the windows.

  It also explains the neighbourly goodwill. Like Dorothy, we have dispatched the Wicked Witch of the West without realizing it. A neighbourhood hellion can be a headache, bullying with their menacing attitude, putting everyone in a state of paralyzed annoyance. When our new neighbours venture over to shake our hands, it is as much a congratulation as it is a welcome. Who would not trade the havoc created by a pusher and a regular police presence for the temporary sound of power drills and nail guns?

  17

  The Wake-up Call

  There is something startling, almost spiritual, when a book falls into your hands at the perfect moment, lifting your cares just when you feel your world is ending; materializing like a lighthouse beacon to shepherd you through that stormy patch to a new understanding or attitude. A book that patiently waits to present itself at precisely the right time, right place.

  It is even more remarkable when the book in question is one you have avoided despite persistent recommendations from friends and strangers. I have had this experience with a few books. One of them was Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Sure, I was intrigued by the book’s title but not necessarily by Hemingway. Or by Paris. In fact, I held an almost hostile disdain for Paris, privately rolling my eyes when someone gushed about that city. My lack of interest in Hemingway and Paris were firmly intact when I agreed to go to Paris with a friend. She had once lived there, and she wanted to make a return visit but did not want to go alone. As soon as I told people that I was going to Paris, it was as if a concerted campaign had been organized to force a copy of A Moveable Feast into my hands. Everyone and their aunt from St. Denis were recommending it.

  “You must read A Moveable Feast,” they said.

  My forced smile did not deter them.

  “But you’re a journalist and an author. You have to read it!”

  Make me, I glared silently.

  I endured this assault for months, right up to the day of departure. Strangers in the lineup to board the Eurostar to Paris urged it on me, practically shoved the thing down my throat as if under a financial obligation or incentive to do so. Each time I said that I had never read A Moveable Feast, they cried, “You must!” My private reply was Je refuse.

  By the time my friend and I arrived at our Paris digs, an apartment lent to us by friends of hers, we were soaked to the skin from the rain, and in a thunderous temper to match. I threw off my wet clothes and, while trying to warm myself up, sulkily gravitated toward the living room bookshelves. There, sitting with Gallic insouciance, was A Moveable Feast.

  “For crying out loud!” I petulantly grabbed the paperback off the shelf and opened it to the first page, muttering, “I hate you already.” But within a minute it had me under its spell. From the remark about the rain (it was pouring at that very moment!) to the setting of the book (Hemingway was writing about the very neighbourhood in which we were staying!), it felt as if the book were meant for me. It did not leave my hands until I had gobbled up every sentence, and until I had conducted a pilgrimage to every place it referenced. My love for Paris has since become boundless.

  During the renovation of this English home not one but two books land in my lap. I am desperate for my mind to be hijacked from decisions about budgets and floor tiles and relocating gas meters, boilers, and electrical panels. So, while grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s, I impulsively pick up Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore. The book is set in Bristol, albeit in an earlier century, and Dunmore herself was a Bristolian, and I reason that it might acclimatize me to this new city that we will call home.

  One of the novel’s central characters, John Diner Tredevant, is a master builder who has invested all he has in the construction of a row of terraced homes. It is 1792, and his financial success is unexpectedly threatened by France’s fomenting revolution and the political uncertainty it casts among British homebuyers. Shades of the Brexit landscape, I think. What anchors my attention is Tredevant’s obsession with housing, and how home-buying and home-building fantasies can so easily lead to madness. I clearly see his folly, can even feel his folly, but I cannot decide if my sympathies are with him and his desire to realize his creative talents and reap the financial benefits for his family, or with his long-suffering wife, who has little option but to stand by passively and witness his self-destruction.

  Where do I fit into this? Have I become as home obsessed as Tredevant? Like him, I have invested every dime I have renovating this English home. Is that prudent or foolish? If Tredevant had lived today would he, too, be trolling Rightmove and Zoopla?

  BEFORE THE SECOND BOOK FALLS serendipitously into my hands, a devastation beyond belief occurs: The Husband and I wake up on the morning of June 14 to news that a fire has destroyed a twenty-four-storey apartment block in London. Much later, it will be reported that seventy-two people have died and more than two hundred families have lost their homes and belongings.

  When the first pictures appear on the TV, I think terrorist attack. But then the cause is revealed, and it strikes me as equally horrific. Lives have been lost because someone cut corners on the procurement of materials; someone manufactured faulty, immensely flammable cladding; building standards and regulations were overlooked and ignored despite constant complaints and warnings by residents. That bright, energetic people have been the sacrificial victims on the altar of arrogance, have paid with their lives the price of snubbed advice, is almost too awful to believe. That the manufacturing of flammable building components is likely continuing and being applied to other buildings fills me with ter
ror.

  Hour after hour, night after night, the news blurts new horrors; points fingers at new suspects; defines the sharper, ever-widening parallel lines of distinction between race and class that exist in Britain. Confronting their leaders and demanding answers and restitution, survivors and supporters are rabid with accusations, frothing at the bureaucratically crafted key messages, baying and howling with their discomfiting grief. Politicians and royalty pay their respects, and the degree of their compassion and action is parsed and scrutinized. Everyone is a potential accessory to the crime. From every angle it is a catastrophe, but the question no one immediately homes in on is this: Who made the flammable material in the first place, and why are they not being held to account? Blame the council, yes, but is it not just as crucial to go after the manufacturers?

  How much of a home is flammable? A large percentage. Lighter building materials, more petroleum-based products and materials, open-plan layouts—they all contribute to an efficient cocktail for destruction when fire strikes. It can take just three to five minutes for a room to get hot enough to burst into flames.

  Why, in this post-millennial era, have we not developed safer materials? Or if they exist, why does no one see fit to apply them to new builds or to existing buildings being retrofitted? How does stuff like this escape building code when the relative safety of something like an electrical socket in a bathroom is deemed beyond the pale?

  Of course, we know why. Cost.

  What can be more terrifying than the loss of life in what is supposed to be a person’s safest refuge—their home? What else but manslaughter can you call the negligence of a builder who installs dangerous materials in your home? Those who survived the Grenfell Tower fire have lost family, friends, neighbours, classmates. They have also lost their sanctuaries, along with all the totems and treasures, large and small, that animated their souls, their personalities.

  When you think of it, humankind has not progressed much further than sticks and stones when it comes to building houses. We are more concerned with how the house looks, how streamlined its kitchen, how opulent and high-tech the fittings and fixtures. We are more focused on the visual design than on the safety of the fundamental building blocks. We tut-tut about life being cheap in so-called Third World countries, but First World countries are just as guilty.

  The Grenfell Tower fire takes the air out of my ballooning aspirations. The petty things I am stressing over—how to surmount bureaucratic hoops and lingo to get our electric and gas meters moved, choosing bathroom fixtures, wondering how much the kitchen cabinets will cost—now feel like a guilty pleasure. None of it is as pressing as it was a few days ago. What replaces it is an awareness of how fortunate we are just to have a home. I suddenly feel as rich as if I belong to the 1 percent.

  Walking through clouds of construction dust, I take a more practical, less materialistic, view of our home. I consider stopping the build, cleaning up the site, and moving in, adapting to what we have. At least the roof is watertight; we can make do. The words of Birdcage Walk’s narrator, Lizzie Fawkes, return to haunt me: “Our houses are palaces to those who have none.”

  A WEEK LATER, I BEGIN READING a second book, The Forsyte Saga. As with A Moveable Feast, I had no previous interest in this series of novels, nor did I watch the television adaptation. When I spied the slim, faded-green-leather volumes sitting in a curbside box, I dithered over whether to take them. I had, after all, committed myself to weeding our possessions, not adding to them. But books—ah, such a weakness. I picked up one of the volumes and thumbed its brittle, yellowed pages. The books were small; pocket sized, really. And free. Under such conditions it is easy to yield to temptation.

  I always thought The Forsyte Saga was about a family, but it is actually about a house, about avaricious attitudes toward property (not just houses, but also art, women, and relationships), and about how possession warps and entangles in spite of our delusion that it does not. It is about the dreams we load into a home in the wishful belief that the home will transform our life, our marriage, our outlook on the world.

  After reading a few chapters I shift uncomfortably in my chair. The snobby, ungracious, competitive Forsyte men, descended from farmers, have evolved into “men of property”; men whose whims and desires are sated with a flourish of their chequebook; men who are all about possession. As Young Jolyon says, “We are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit that it’s a question of degree, but what I call a ‘Forsyte’ is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property—it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation—is his hallmark.”

  I wholly lacked the wealth and social stature of the fictional Forsytes, but I was as guilty of self-satisfaction and possession as them, as contemptuous of the overreaching lifestyles and pretensions of others while simultaneously courting them for myself. The Husband and I had bought a house in a middle-class, inner-city neighbourhood, and here I was dumping all my financial resources into a dream of transforming it, and by extension us, into a grander version. Was it right?

  In the same way that I feel awkward sitting in a café with a cup of tea on the site where a horrific battle was fought, where hundreds were slaughtered in previous centuries, here I was, in a house formerly occupied by poor working-class people, ordering a bathroom vanity that would have put food on their table for at least three years. Yes, times change and economics change, but I am nonetheless sensitive to how we blunder in and plaster over the lives of our ancestors.

  IS THERE SUCH A THING as a poor neighbourhood anymore or is it an abstraction? Today’s lower-class neighbourhood is tomorrow’s million-dollar des res.

  This thought is slopping around my mind when I see next-door neighbour Ali puttering in her garden. I wave to her and call out hello. She turns on her heel and stomps back into her house, slamming her kitchen door.

  Ouch. She had been so friendly up until now. Is our noisy renovation getting to her?

  An hour later, The Husband comes in the front door, having returned from the umpteenth visit to the recycling centre. He looks at me accusingly.

  “Did you say something to Ali?”

  When something bad happens, The Husband tends to see me as the instigator. He has a habit of saying, whenever I leave the house, even when I am going to church, “Don’t start any fights.” Now he thinks I have offended our neighbour.

  “Why is it always my fault?” I ask.

  “Well, she had the look of thunder about her. I said hello, and she ignored me.”

  “And that is somehow my doing?”

  I am this close to snapping. Am I expected to carry this renovation as well as carry the blame for some stranger’s change of mood? However, I draw back my indignation in case my words boomerang and hit me. The delicate mood that exists between The Husband and me has been hard won, and I do not want to upset it. Those renovation stats about divorce are never far from my thoughts.

  Instead, I say, “Maybe the noise is getting to her.” I suggest a modified Clooney manoeuvre. (George Clooney reportedly appeased neighbours during his home renovation with a £45,000 package that included a holiday in Corfu, a six-week stay in a luxury hotel, a whack of cash, and a new vacuum cleaner.) Our version would be a restaurant voucher.

  “The offer of dinner might set a dangerous precedent,” says The Husband.

  We mull over other possible options of compensation as we trudge upstairs to continue painting the master bedroom.

  The bedroom windows face the street, and they are open. As we pour paint into our trays and prime our rollers, Ali’s voice reaches our ears. She is speaking angrily to someone out front. We edge closer to the window to listen.

  “I’m being evicted,” she announces bitterly to a neighbour who has sauntered by.

  The Husband and I exchange looks of surprise and simultaneously mouth, Why?

  Ali continues her rant: “Been living here for eigh
t years, and now the owner tells me to look for someplace else to live, and to be out by October. She’s decided to sell the house.”

  We look at one another again, nod and grimace understanding.

  “There’s no place to rent around here anymore,” Ali continues. “This is what’s changing the neighbourhood, and it’s not good. Where will us renters live? These people next door [she cocks her thumb at our house, and our bodies reflexively reel back]—they move from nowhere and buy here, then tart it up. Wouldn’t be surprised if they flipped it. It’s just greed, you know? And now I’m being evicted because of gentrification.”

  So that explains the sudden coolness: we have gone from being the saviour Dorothy jettisoning the Wicked Neighbour of Easton to being the ugly face of gentrified boomers with indexed pension plans and cash inheritances.

  At first, I feel guilty—we both do—but then my spine straightens. I am not having it. Blaming older people for the lack of affordable rental housing is a cheap, self-serving excuse. We are not the cause of the housing crisis; even the government is not directly to blame, though it absolutely needs to apply some teeth to stop developers from land banking on an industrial scale. What about those people who bank their homes: who purchase a home—or multiple homes—and leave them empty and derelict without developing them or fixing them up, figuring that if they wait long enough, they will double—maybe even triple—their money without lifting a finger? Those are the pariahs: the people who knowingly hold property in abeyance without the decency of at least tenanting the digs. What about the developers who promise to build three hundred homes but sit on the land, redraw the plans, scrimp on materials and fixtures, and fabricate delays by waiting for council to reapprove the changes and green-light the revised project?

  We of the rank-and-file class are at the mercy of a minority of super wealthy people who are manipulating the housing market for their sole gain, and their actions, along with the general state of the world’s economies and shifting power structures, have made it ridiculously difficult for young people and young families to buy a home. As the mother of young adults I am acutely aware of this. But it is also true that we have not put up a vigorous enough fight against consumerism and the ancillary cultural bullying that sees so many people spending their paycheques on two or three takeout coffees a day, gym memberships, cell phones and all manner of electronic gadgets that are upgraded with alarming regularity, luxury holidays, cars, expensive clothes, frequent dinners out, concerts, and sports tickets. Consumer-directed pressure and temptation have ensnared us, and the unfortunate victims of this are young people. Add the escalating costs of post-secondary education, and it’s no wonder they are unable to save for a house. There should be laws against such aggressive and financially punitive marketing, because that is the only way we are going to help young people get on the property ladder.