“Yes, I may have gotten—a little chill.” Perhaps it was never too late to master the famously British knack for understatement.
“Let’s get you into a nice hot shower first, and then we’ll bandage your foot. That cut looks deep, Liana. You really shouldn’t be so casual about it.”
Liana weaved to the other side of the house, leaving red footprints down the hall. In previous showers here, she’d had trouble with scalding, but this time she couldn’t get the water hot enough. She huddled under the dribble until finally the water grew tepid, and then, with a shudder, wrapped herself in one of their big white bath sheets, trying to keep from getting blood on the towel.
Emerging in jeans and an unseasonably warm sweater she’d found in the guest room’s dresser, Liana was grateful for the cut on her foot, which gave Regent something to fuss over and distracted her hostess from the fact that she was still trembling. Regent trickled the oozing inch-long gash with antiseptic and bound it with gauze and adhesive tape, whose excessive swaddling didn’t make up for its being several years old; the tape was discolored, and barely stuck. Meanwhile, Liana threw the couple a bone. She told them how she had injured her foot, embellishing just enough to make it a serviceable story.
The foot story was a decoy. It obviated telling the other one. At twenty-three, Liana hadn’t accumulated many stories; until now, she had hungered for more. Vastly superior to carvings of hippos, stories were the very souvenirs that this bold stint in Africa had been designed to provide. Whenever she’d scored a proper experience in the past, like the time she’d dated a man who confided that he’d always felt like a woman, or even when she’d had her email hacked, she’d traded on the tale at every opportunity. Perhaps if she’d returned to her parents after this latest ordeal, she’d have burst into tears and delivered the blow-by-blow. But she was abruptly aware that these people were virtual strangers. She’d only make them even more nervous about whether she was irresponsible or lead them to believe that she was an attention seeker with a tendency to exaggerate. It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut. Because instinct dictated that this one was private. Now she knew: there was such a thing as private.
Having aged far more than a few hours that evening, Liana was disheartened to discover that maturity could involve getting smaller. She had been reduced. She was a weaker, more fragile girl than the one who’d piled into Regent’s jeep that afternoon, and in some manner that she couldn’t put her finger on she also felt less real—less here—since in a highly credible alternative universe she was not here.
The couple made a to-do over the importance of getting hot food inside her, but before the dinner had warmed Liana curled around the leopard-print pillow on the sofa and dropped into a comatose slumber. Intuiting something—Beano himself had survived any number of close calls, the worst of which he had kept from Regent, lest she lay down the law that he had to stop hunting in Botswana even sooner than she did—he discouraged his wife from rousing the girl to go to bed, draping her gently in a mohair blanket and carefully tucking the fringe around her pretty wet head.
Predictably, Liana grew into a civilized woman with a regard for the impositions of laundry. She pursued a practical career in marketing in New York, and, after three years, ended an impetuous marriage to an Afghan. Meantime, starting with Kilifi Creek, she assembled an offbeat collection. It was a class of moments that most adults stockpile: the times they almost died. Rarely was there a good reason, or any warning. No majestic life lessons presented themselves in compensation for having been given a fright. In contrast to, say, the rescue of a child from a fire, most of these incidents were in no way heroic. They were more a matter of stepping distractedly off a curb, only to feel the draft of the M4 bus flattening your hair.
Not living close to a public pool, Liana took up running in her late twenties. One evening, along her usual route, a minivan shot out of a parking garage without checking for pedestrians and missed her by a whisker. Had she not stopped to double-knot her left running shoe before leaving her apartment, she would be dead. Later: she was taking a scuba-diving course on Cape Cod when a surge about a hundred feet deep dislodged her mask and knocked her regulator from her mouth. The Atlantic was unnervingly murky, and her panic was absolute. Sure, they taught you to make regular decompression stops, and to exhale evenly as you ascended, but it was early in her training. If her instructor hadn’t managed to grab her before she bolted for the surface while holding her breath, her lungs would have exploded and she would be dead. Still later: had she not unaccountably thought better of lunging forward on her Citi Bike on Seventh Avenue when the light turned green, the garbage truck would still have taken a sharp left onto Sixteenth Street without signaling, and she would be dead. There was nothing else to learn, though that was something to learn, something inchoate and large.
The scar on her right foot, wormy and white (the flap should have been stitched), became a totem of this not-really-a-lesson. Oh, she’d considered the episode, and felt free to conclude that she had overestimated her swimming ability, or underestimated the insidious, bigger-than-you powers of water. Or she could sensibly have decided that swimming alone anywhere was tempting fate. She might have concocted a loftier version, wherein she had been rescued by an almighty presence who had grand plans for her—grander than marketing. But that wasn’t it. Any of those interpretations would have been plastered on top, like the poorly adhering bandage on that gash. The message was bigger and dumber and blunter than that, and she was a bright woman, with no desire to disguise it.
After Liana was promoted to director of marketing at BraceYourself—a rapidly expanding firm that made the neoprene joint supports popular with aging boomers still pounding the pavement—she moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where she could now afford a stylish one-bedroom on the twenty-sixth floor, facing Broadway. The awful Afghan behind her, she’d started dating again. The age of thirty-seven marked a good time in her life. She was well paid and roundly liked in the office; she relished New York; though she’d regained an interest in men, she didn’t feel desperate. Many an evening without plans she would pour a glass of wine, take the elevator to the top floor, and slip up a last flight of stairs; roof access was one of the reasons she’d chosen the apartment. Especially in summertime, the regal overlook made her feel rich beyond measure. Lounging against the railing sipping Chenin Blanc, Liana would bask in the lights and echoing taxi horns of the city, sometimes sneaking a cigarette. The air would be fat and soft in her hair—which was shorter now, with a becoming cut. So when she finally met a man whom she actually liked, she invited him to her building’s traditional Fourth of July potluck picnic on the roof to show it off.
“Are you sure you’re safe, sitting there?” David said solicitously. They had sifted away from the tables of wheat berry salad and smoked tofu patties to talk.
His concern was touching; perhaps he liked her, too. But she was perfectly stable—lodged against the perpendicular railing on a northern corner, feet braced on a bolted-down bench, weight firmly forward—and her consort had nothing to fear. Liana may have grown warier of water, but heights had never induced the vertigo from which others suffered. Besides, David was awfully tall, and the small boost in altitude was equalizing.
“You’re just worried that I’ll have a better view of the fireworks. Refill?” She leaned down for the Merlot on the bench for a generous pour into their plastic glasses. Resorting to a standard fallback for a first date, they had been exchanging travel stories, and impulsively—there was something about this guy that she trusted—she told him about Kilifi Creek. Having never shared the tale, she was startled by how little time it took to tell. But that was the nature of these stories. They were about what could have happened, or should have happened, but didn’t. They were very nearly not stories at all.
“That must have been pretty scary,” he
said dutifully. He sounded let down, as if she’d told a joke without a punch line.
“I wasn’t scared,” she reflected. “I couldn’t afford to be. Only later, and then there was no longer anything to be afraid of. That’s part of what was interesting: having been cheated of feeling afraid. Usually, when you have a near miss, it’s an instant. A little flash, like, Wow. That was weird. This one went on forever, or seemed to. I was going to die, floating off on the Indian Ocean until I lost consciousness, or I wasn’t. It was a long time to be in this … in-between state.” She laughed. “I don’t know, don’t make me embarrassed. I’ve no idea what I’m trying to say.”
Attempting to seem captivated by the waning sunset, Liana no more than shifted her hips, by way of expressing her discomfort that her story had landed flat. Nothing foolhardy. For the oddest moment, she thought that David had pushed her, and was therefore not a nice man at all but a lunatic. Because what happened next was both enormously subtle and plain enormous—the way the difference between knocking over a glass and not knocking over a glass could be a matter of upsetting its angle by a single greater or lesser degree. Greater, this time. Throw any body of mass that one extra increment off its axis, and rather than barely brush against it you might as well have hurled it at a wall.
With the same quiet clarity with which she had registered in Kilifi, I am being swept out to sea, she grasped simply, Oh. I lost my balance. For she was now executing the perfect backflip that she’d never been able to pull off on a high dive. The air rushed in her ears like water. This time the feeling was different—that is, the starkness was there, the calmness was there also, but these clean, serene sensations were spiked with a sharp surprise, which quickly morphed to perplexity, and then to sorrow. She fit in a wisp of disappointment before the fall was through. Her eyes tearing, the lights of high-rises blurred. Above, the evening sky rippled into the infinite ocean that had waited to greet her for fourteen years: largely good years, really—gravy, a long and lucky reprieve. Then, of course, what had mattered was her body striking the plane, and now what mattered was not striking it—and what were the chances of that? By the time she reached the sidewalk, Liana had taken back her surprise. At some point there was no almost. That had always been the message. There were bystanders, and they would get the message, too.
Repossession
On first viewing the two-story semidetached on Lansing Terrace, Helen Rutledge dismissed outright the absurd impression that she was not welcome here. She was a sensible young woman—all right, no longer that young—who routinely privileged the should over the was. This should be the perfect house for her; ergo, it was. Three bedrooms, for herself, a study (perhaps in time a nursery?), and guests: tick. Not one of those decrepit Georgian headaches whose renovations were hog-tied by preservation orders, the structure was at least postwar: tick. Granted, the nondescript semi of yellow brick was located in deep South London, but any property whose purchase someone in Helen’s income bracket could swing was bound to involve a hefty commute to a job in NW1. Indeed, that was the clincher: the house was a steal. Tick, tick, tick!
As for whether she harbored any reservations about 21 Lansing Terrace having been repossessed, the answer was certainly not. A tax accountant, Helen held rules in high esteem. She had no sympathy for people who didn’t exert control over their circumstances—who allowed their lives to go higgledy-piggledy and so created messes for responsible citizenry to clean up. For Helen, the prospect of being unable to pay any bill slipped through her letter box was mortifying. If the previous owner had purchased a property beyond his or her means, such culpable foolhardiness ought rightly to be punished, and that’s all there was to it.
Given the paltry asking price—or paltry in London terms—she was surprised to face no competition, and the estate agent acting for the bank accepted her offer with a hastiness that more seasoned house hunters might have found alarming. But as a first-time buyer, Helen wasn’t about to look a gift house in the mouth. She would continue to rent her flat in Dulwich for a month after the closing in order to do a spot of spiffing up. The persistent unpleasantness that imbued the interior—nothing whose source you could quite identify, and therefore nothing—could surely be ameliorated with a few licks of paint.
Handy for her gender and generation, Helen spent her first Saturday as a homeowner covering the sitting room walls in a vibrant, nervy color that she’d found in the Guardian Weekend’s interior design pages: a dazzling aqua popular for plastic toys. By late afternoon, a beaming second coat had obliterated the somber underlying shade, a light gray with a queasy purple undertone, as if the room had been bruised. Even if the new paint job hadn’t, somehow, settled—the panels of blue-green seemed to float slightly forward of the plasterboard—she’d introduced a splash of vivacity to the ground floor.
She returned the following morning to have a go at the skirting boards. Yet her key simply would not turn the upper lock, though she jiggled it this way and that for a solid ten minutes. Whoosh, up the homeowner’s learning curve: when it was your property, you couldn’t ring the landlord to come and fix it, and Helen fought an urge to cry. The house didn’t like her and didn’t want her inside.
The sensation of personal rejection being flagrantly ridiculous, she got a grip and located a locksmith on her mobile, then sat on the step to wait. It was autumn, and she noticed too late that a scraggly tree growing at a deranged angle overhead had dropped stinky violet berries onto the step. So now her jeans looked bruised as well, their seat stained with purple blotches that would never wash out. Worse, once the locksmith rocked up, he tried the key once and the door swung wide, open sesame. He still charged a call-out fee, quite a packet to part with for the privilege of feeling like a dunce.
In the entryway, the quality of the light glooming from the sitting room doorway was inexplicably dingy and sulking, although the south-facing front windows still had no curtains and the sky was clear. Helen ventured in to admire yesterday’s daring makeover, only to find the walls a color that would never be employed for a toy. The shade was still blue, of a sort, but sullen. Rather than refract the sunshine shafting through the windows, this hue consumed the light, sucking every photon from the rays like a child slurping the last of a soda. When she came closer, it was clear the paint hadn’t dried, either, or just enough to have grown mucky and thick. The surface was bubbling, making creepy little pipping sounds, and in long vertical streaks the old purplish gray glowered through. Since obviously the whole job would have to be done again, she touched the paint that had looked so jaunty and dashingly modern when she locked up on Saturday, and it stuck to her finger, stringing like bubblegum when she pulled away. It was as if the outrageously defective product that she’d slathered on her sitting room was dissolving earlier layers of paint beneath.
Which was the only explanation for what rapidly emerged on the far wall. At first she thought it was a trick of the queer light, or an accidental arrangement of streaks and blisters. But no, those were letters—in black, crudely formed and dripping, as if slashed with a wide, overladen brush, and underscored for good measure:
MY HOUSE!
So spiteful were some delinquent homeowners, it was said, that they vandalized their own homes before being evicted. The bank would have arranged for any damage to be tidied before putting the house on the market. And now her warped poor luck with a bad batch of paint—she might as well have covered the room in battery acid—had exposed some ghastly deadbeat’s defiant parting graffiti.
“It’s not your house anymore!” Helen announced aloud—though the walls ate the sound as voraciously as the light, and her voice sounded terribly tiny.
She returned the remains of the paint in a state of righteous indignation, but the salesman at B&Q was skeptical—even more so once she’d described the burbling horror show in gory detail. “Never heard of that, love. Sure you didn’t just apply the second coat before the first was dry?”
“If I can execute the directions in 11,520 pages o
f Her Majesty’s tax code,” she huffed, “I can follow the back of a tin.” But he clearly delivered her refund only to get this crackpot out of his hair.
By the time she stopped back by Lansing Terrace midweek it was evident that the paint would never cure. The sticky mess couldn’t be called “Island Breeze” now, for it had now churned into a vomitty miasma of a hue more like “Caribbean Twister.” So Helen was obliged to hire a contractor to replace the plasterboard. When it came time to choose a color for the sitting room again, she found she’d lost her nerve, and opted for an innocuous shade the contractor recommended as popular called “Moonlit Sky”—which turned out to be light gray with a queasy purple undertone.
For her next home improvement project in the master bedroom, Helen fancied ripping up the lumpy, nubbled beige carpet and refinishing the floorboards. All the magazines indicated that carpet was naff. Chic Londoners now opted for burnished wood accented with arty throw rugs.
But even tearing up the old wall-to-wall was exhausting. The carpet had been fanatically tacked, and the nails pierced her work gloves until her hands were sore and swollen. Slicing the carpet into the short widths that the council required for pickup entailed more than one slip with the box cutter. The painful nicks so slowed her typing of spreadsheets at work that a colleague in the next cubicle needled her for regression to hunt-and-peck.
Once she rented the sander, the real frustration began. She knew you had to remove any nails from the flooring, and numerous tacks had pulled through the carpet padding and remained behind in the wood. So she had fanatically smoothed her puffy bare hands over the boards to search out even the smallest bit of metal, countersinking stray spikes with a hammer and using pliers to tug out the tacks with heads. Yet whenever she started the machine—a deafening, unwieldy monster that was honestly rather frightening—it shrieked immediately on a raised nail, which shredded the sandpaper. The belts were pricey as well as bothersome to replace, and by the day’s end she must have gone through a dozen—even after repeatedly caressing the whole floor on her hands and knees, checking every square inch for extrusions.
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