She takes another step closer—
The last thing I want to do is go out. I don’t like the idea of leaving the house empty so soon after someone has attempted to get inside, or my having to return to it alone afterwards.
But I need food and a few basics, and I don’t have to go far: there’s a supermarket right across the street.
I figure the whole excursion will only take twenty minutes, but I spend almost an hour traipsing up and down the aisles, agonizing over every decision, trying to minimize the dent I’m going to make in my cash.
I end up with two heavy bags filled mostly with off-brand dried pasta and tinned things, plus a bright pink yoga mat.
I’m walking back along Main Street, almost at the turn for Delaney Row, when I see something that pulls me up short: my house, glowing in the window of Harrington Properties.
Underneath the words For Sale.
Still.
I feel a flush of annoyance.
It’s Sunday afternoon; beyond the lights of the display, the office is empty and dark. Behind me, steady streams of pedestrians pass in both directions. I wonder how many more badly behaved house-hunters I might yet have to contend with when my eyes land on my own reflection in the glass.
And the woman standing a couple of steps behind me.
She has thick, dark hair resting on her shoulders.
Her facial features are blurred, indistinct in the glass.
Any hope that she might simply be waiting for me to step aside disappears when she comes a step closer and cocks her head, trying to get a better view of my face, as if she thinks she might recognize me.
Maybe she does.
I’d presumed I look so different now that this couldn’t happen. Not even round here. So much so that I hadn’t really considered what I’d do if it did.
I do know what I can’t do: I can’t speak to her. How badly I’ve handled speaking to a complete stranger already today has proved that beyond all doubt.
She takes another step closer—
I stiffen.
—and raises her hand, as if she’s going to tap me on the shoulder—
Blood rushes in my ears.
—but she hesitates, and then finally, finally, thinks better of it and walks away.
I gulp down breaths, then hurry across Main Street, dodging cars and cyclists rather than waiting for a break in the traffic, with my heart jackhammering in my chest.
I dart up Delaney Row, desperate to get back inside my house and close the door behind me.
But there’s a woman outside number two.
Pulling its door closed – she’s just leaving.
I say a silent prayer it’s a visitor who won’t care about meeting the new neighbour. I pick up my pace and pretend the ground is absolutely fascinating.
‘Ellie?’
I look up with what I hope appears to be complete surprise.
‘I’m Sophie,’ she says. ‘Alex’s sister?’ She looks me up and down, lingering for a beat on the yoga mat. ‘Moving is just the worst, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, before registering that this was a reference to my appearance.
We are both bare-faced and in scuffed trainers and jeans, but otherwise we couldn’t be more different.
Sophie is in a Breton under a navy trench coat, her trainers are probably a designer brand that inexplicably came pre-scuffed, and her hair is the glossy, expertly tinted blonde I can only vaguely remember having.
My hair is a coarse, frizzy mess and I’m in my cheap, plasticky raincoat.
She’s Technicolor, I’m greyscale.
‘Well, I’m still cleaning,’ I say.
‘Really?’ She frowns. ‘It looked pretty clean at the viewing.’
Of course Sophie viewed the house.
Of course she did.
I hate that she’s been inside my home, that she knows exactly what it looks like in there, and that, so long as she doesn’t see me carrying in paint pots or having new furniture delivered or tradesmen arriving on site, she’ll know that it still looks like that.
‘I didn’t realize it had sold,’ she says now, echoing her brother. ‘You must have moved at lightning speed. Seemed like it was only on the market for a day or two.’
‘Has Alex lived here long?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.
But it’s the wrong thing to say. Sophie presses her lips together in a tight line before answering.
‘It’s my house,’ she says. ‘He’s just the lodger.’
‘Oh, sorry. I—’
‘I’m here three years. Alex moved in for a couple of weeks six months ago.’ A pause. ‘I rent.’
I wonder if she wanted to buy number one and is annoyed with me because she didn’t get the chance.
‘She’ll never take it down, just FYI,’ Sophie says.
‘The sign,’ she clarifies when I look at her questioningly.
She lifts her chin to indicate the FOR SALE board still stuck to the front of my house.
‘You’ll see her signs up everywhere around here, but half of them are on houses that have already sold.
You’re probably better off taking it down yourself. ’
I look up at it too.
The wood is bolted to the brick in two places.
‘I think I’d need a drill,’ I say.
‘Use mine.’ Sophie takes a step back so she can ring her own doorbell. She opens the door with her key and shouts into the void beyond, ‘Alex? Alex, grab the drill!’
‘Oh, it’s OK if he’s—’ I start.
‘It’s fine.’ She waves a hand. ‘So. Paris.’
‘Paris?’
Another frown. ‘I thought Alex said that’s where you were, before this.’
‘Oh. Right.’
He must have reported back everything I said. What did I say?
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Oh, just …’ I shrug a shoulder. ‘Working in a bar.’
The stupidity of it immediately sends flares to both my cheeks. I’d have needed to own that imaginary bar to have had any hope of coming back to Ireland with enough money to buy a house.
I ask her what she does before she can ask me any more about it.
‘I own Sips,’ she says. ‘The cafe on Main Street?’
Alex’s head suddenly appears in the doorway.
‘Did you say—?’ he starts, then stops when he sees me. ‘Oh.’ A warm smile. ‘Hello again.’
‘Get the drill,’ Sophie commands. ‘Take down the sign for her.’
‘What sign?’
An impatient eye-roll. ‘The FOR SALE sign.’
‘It’s OK,’ I start. ‘There’s no need to—’
‘It’s no problem,’ Sophie says to me.
‘It’s no problem,’ Alex repeats before disappearing inside again.
Sophie sighs deeply, as if her brother’s uselessness is her lifelong persecution, her cross to bear.
Then her eyes flick to my house. ‘It’s just you?’
I nod.
‘Must have been tough, getting a mortgage on your own. Especially after you’d been away.’
I feel like I’m standing above a sinkhole, balanced precariously on splintering ground. Any moment now, it will open up beneath me and I’ll fall to my death while Sophie stands on the edge with her arms folded, still peppering me with questions as I disappear, screaming, into the abyss.
‘Well,’ I say. ‘It was lovely to meet you, but I’d better be—’
Alex returns, brandishing a cordless drill.
‘By the way,’ he says to me, ‘take no notice of Annalise.’
‘What did she do?’ Sophie asks, but it’s unclear which one of us she’s addressing and I don’t know what we’re talking about.
‘Next door,’ Alex explains to me. ‘The woman in number three. She’s a bit, you know …
’ He points a finger at his head and traces a circle.
‘And not exactly tech-savvy. One time, she put a message in the group about cooking lamb. No one could figure out what she was on about. Turns out she thought she was on Google.’ He rolls his eyes, but to signal affectionate bemusement rather than real annoyance.
‘What did she do?’ Sophie demands.
‘She just’ – Alex waves a hand – ‘messaged something weird.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
Sophie turns to me. ‘What did she say?’
‘“I pray the house is happy now, at long last.”’ After a beat, I add an unconvincing, ‘Or something like that.’
Sophie frowns.
‘Do you know what she meant?’ I ask.
The siblings exchange a glance that suggests they do.
‘Well—’ Sophie starts just as Alex says a firm, ‘No,’ cutting her off.
‘Are you sure?’
I look at Alex, who nods, and then Sophie, who looks away.
‘Like I said, take no notice of her,’ Alex says breezily. He raises the drill. ‘Now, let’s get that sign down …’
I don’t want to make too big a deal of anything, so I say something about food needing to go in the freezer and turn to put the key in my door.
Alex looks relieved. He says he’ll leave the sign in my yard.
I tell Sophie it was nice to meet her. She nods but doesn’t say it back.
I think I hear some furious whispering after I’ve gone inside, but a moment later the whine of the drill drowns everything else out.
I stand in the hall, replaying the conversation.
I know why I’m lying to them, but why are they lying to me?
I dump my wares at my feet and take out my phone. The WhatsApp icon has a red dot: a dozen new messages. More welcomes and a call for volunteers for a clean-up along the banks of the river Dodder next Sunday morning starting at 9 a.m.
And a new message from Annalise.
Welcome, Ellie! Wishing you the best in your new home.
I’m confused, and then I wonder if she’s confused, if she doesn’t realize that this is her second welcome.
But then I scroll back up and see that the first message she sent has been deleted.
I pray the house is happy now, at long last!
When I first read it, I’d assumed she’d been referring to the house having been unoccupied before I moved in.
Sure, it was a weird way to say it, and it did sound a tad ominous.
I doubted Hallmark would put it on a New Home card, even with the jaunty exclamation mark.
But after Sophie and Alex’s weirdness, I’m wondering if she could have meant something else. I worry that she did.
Or maybe the problem is Alex and Sophie.
Do they know about me?
Could they?
I open a new browser window and type my address into the search bar, but the results are all links to the listing. The top one is on Harrington Properties’ own website – still up, still showing the house for sale. I go as far as the fifth page of results but don’t see anything else.
I tell myself I’m being paranoid and put the phone away.
It’s nearly four o’clock; in a couple of hours, it’ll be dark.
Still, it’s surprising how gloomy it already is in here.
Flipping the light switch in the hall achieves nothing except a hollow clicking noise and there’s no bulb in the living room’s ceiling light.
But when I flip the switch in the spreading-stain room, success!
I have visions of screwing and unscrewing my one working lightbulb all evening, moving it around the house with me, until I go into the kitchen and discover that it has a working one as well.
And that it’s nearly as cold in here as it was outside. The air feels tinged with the kind of chilly, musty damp you’d expect from a derelict structure left open to the elements.
This place just can’t seem to hold heat.
I open the faux cabinet that hides the boiler and turn the heating system on, because I’m starting to think that I’d rather have to pay a bill than die of hypothermia.
It chugs to life, then starts to groan and splutter like an engine running out of fuel.
I wonder if boilers can explode. I google it: yes.
Multiple internet sources are in agreement that the most common sign this is about to happen is strange noises.
Hurriedly I flip the switch back to OFF.
I unpack my haul of groceries, which seem to have reduced in size since the supermarket; arranged in the fridge and on one cabinet shelf, they look like the barest of wartime rations.
I fill my new, lone saucepan with water and set it on the hob.
It’s a bit late in the day for coffee, but I need a hot cup of something to warm me up, and my budget didn’t stretch to tea bags too.
I soon realize that standing still, waiting for it to boil, isn’t helping, so I take the yoga mat and run upstairs.
The landing light works and, thanks to its position right outside the office door, it banishes its shadows.
My suitcase is flipped open on the floor in there.
The room is so narrow, it takes up more than half its width.
I remove what I need, close it, right it and push it into a corner, out of the way.
I unroll the yoga mat and lay it on the floor. I shake out my thin sleeping bag and lay it on top. I fold my bulkiest sweatshirt into as tight a bundle as I can and then pull a T-shirt over it, fashioning a makeshift pillow and pillowcase.
I position it so that, when I’m sleeping in here later, I’ll be facing the door.
I think of another small room then, grim and cold, haunted by the pain of past occupants.
I hear noises that never really stop. And I sense a familiar despair, one that manifests as a hard, dense pit in my stomach that pulls me away from the world, forcing me to fold into myself, as if my own soul has been replaced by a supermassive black hole that is slowly devouring the rest of me, what’s left of me, all of me.
I try not to think of that.
A distant bubbling noise, downstairs: the water, starting to boil.
I turn to go. But when my eyes land on the threshold bar separating the carpeting on the landing from the carpeting in the bedroom, I see that the latter’s edge is frayed and rising, coming loose.
It’s an itch I just have to scratch.
I cross the landing and bend to slip my fingers beneath the carpet and lift, feeling at first a resistant tug and then the almost instant surrender of the tacks.
Underneath are a couple of inches of healthy-looking floorboards, illuminated in the strip of light spilling through the bedroom’s open door.
With my back to the room, I pull harder, freeing the carpet from the gripper, ripping it away from the wall in front of me and then the walls on either side too.
I move backwards, into the shadows, revealing more and more floorboards, stupidly proud of my ability to change this room for the better simply by pulling up dirty carpet.
Two-thirds of the way in, just as the floppy bulk becomes unmanageable in my arms, I see it.
I inadvertently reveal it.
A stain.
Centred in the spill of landing light like a prop spotlighted on a stage. A mix of greens and browns, but bleached out, faded.
A human stain.
I’m looking at the shape of a person lying with their arms by their sides and legs slightly apart, feet towards the door. The outline of the head is distended, bulging on the left like a strange, misshapen halo.
The colours are strongest there.
I drop the carpet, letting its bulk fall and unroll a little, while the scream in my chest scrambles up into my throat.