Chapter 3
Unfortunately, the hob was also electric.
With no clue how to turn the electricity on, there was no way to cook anything.
I popped the pasta and sauces, which I’d hurriedly bought at one of the big supermarkets on my escape, into the empty cupboards.
Thankfully, though deeply outdated, the cupboards were clean and structurally sound.
Then I sat in the middle of the living room floor and ate the crisps and grapes I’d bought as snacks for the road.
It was a poor first meal for a new home. I’d imagined a takeaway pizza and champagne in a mug. I hadn’t brought any champagne with me. Probably couldn’t have justified it, even if I had remembered to buy some. Instead, I cupped my hands under the kitchen tap and drank water from my palms.
I watched the sunlight shift around the space, a slow spotlight warming then cooling. As the room started to darken, I felt a stab of panic.
What had I done? I’d moved my entire life to a place I didn’t know. To up sticks and move so far, alone, in my thirties was an insane thing to do.
Suddenly I missed my old room in Edinburgh.
I missed the grey view from my small window.
I missed the street outside, the near-constant sound of other people.
I missed knowing which cafés were good and which were tourist traps.
I missed the smell of the place, the malty toasted scent from the breweries, the odd sea-salt-tinged gust from Leith.
I stood up.
No, I was not going to think like that. That was my old life, the one I’d escaped. I would commit to this new life and forget what I’d left behind me.
Then, and only then, would I be happy.
I wiped my face and checked my phone. Thirty percent battery. It was getting late. What I needed was sleep. Yes, a good night’s rest. I’d feel better in the morning.
I checked the front door. The shadowy silhouette of the elm tree outside shimmered through the mottled glass of the door’s single small window.
Soon it would be properly summer and the dusk would creep along the horizon until it became dawn again.
True darkness was not a real thing in Scottish summers.
Everything just turned a dull, dark grey.
The door was locked, but I slipped the chain on as well.
Then I climbed the stairs to my new bedroom.
I shut the garden gate door and covered the mattress with the single towel I’d brought with me.
I couldn’t remember where I’d packed my pyjamas, so I undressed down to my underwear and slipped into bed under the towel.
I frowned at my sad makeshift sleeping arrangements.
I should have bought bedding. After a thought, I got back up, grabbed my hoodie and bundled it into an improvised pillow.
I lay in the growing gloom.
God, it was going to need so much work. Furniture. Insulation. Possibly a new boiler. New wiring.
I kneaded my forehead with my knuckles.
It was probably unrealistic to think things would go smoothly.
Moving house was stressful. One of the top three most stressful things, even.
Up there with divorce and death. Weren’t there more stressful things though?
Like escaping war. Or the death of someone you loved.
Or serious illness. Now I thought of it, there seemed like a million and one things that should be more stressful than moving house.
I asked myself these things and realised, like I sometimes realise at the end of a long day, that I hadn’t really spoken to another living person in a while.
Sure, I’d spoken to the receptionist who handed over the anachronistic key to my anachronistic lock.
But when had I last properly engaged another human being in conversation?
How many years had I spent just talking to myself?
I wished I could think of someone to call, to talk to about my day, to tell them that I’d arrived safe, but I couldn’t think of a single person.
I’d left everything and everyone behind.
I thought of the miles and miles of countryside all around me.
Instead of soothing, the silence felt claustrophobic.
I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and—not for the first time in my life—pretended they belonged to someone else, someone giving me a hug and telling me I’d be okay.
A creak came through the wall behind me.
I tensed up in bed, ears pricking.
Calm down. It’s just the neighbour.
By the sound of the creak, they were really close by. Literally inches from my head.
I sat up in the dim grey light and listened.
On the other side of the wall, there was a shuffling, like footsteps moving around the room next door.
Could they hear me as much as I could hear them?
Had they followed me upstairs?
I leant closer to the wall.
There was a sudden bang right by my ear.
I fell back, clapping a hand over my mouth.
A loud screech reverberated through the wall.
What on earth were they doing? It sounded like they were moving heavy furniture around.
It was hard to figure out the sounds through the old walls.
Something about the stone warped the noise.
I scrabbled for my phone and checked the time.
Who moves furniture around at eleven at night?
I watched the wall in the near darkness as the clunks and thuds continued. I didn’t know anything about my neighbour. Their character. What they looked like. But I could hear every move they made in uncomfortable intimacy.
Maybe they worked nights. Maybe they were nocturnal.
I lay back down and pulled my hoodie-pillow over my head.
I heard 1a shuffling around for the rest of the night. Their muffled scrapes and knocks, the constant fiddling, pattering, shifting, came through the wall, the hoodie, the fingers in my ears until finally exhaustion took me and I slipped into sleep.
My mind swept through the hills and roads I’d covered on my travel north.
Trees flashed green in my peripheral vision and the grey stream of tarmac felt unending before me.
In my rear-view mirror a darkness followed.
Not a cloud or a storm or a monster of any kind.
Just darkness. And anything that fell within it vanished.
If I could just get to the cottage, I knew I could escape it.
But the road kept going and the darkness kept coming and frustration rose in me until I wanted to tear the steering wheel straight out of the car.
Then, miraculously, I arrived.
This time only one door greeted me. Just one house, all to myself.
What a relief! Everything else that came before must have been a stress dream.
I’d always been plagued by them. Dreams of my hands turning to lead right as an exam starts.
Dreams of my university getting washed away before I was due to arrive.
Dreams of my father unpackaging me from a parcel, the look of excited anticipation falling from his face as he set his eyes on me.
But not now, for here was the house, whole, as promised, as hoped.
I ran inside to get away from the gathering darkness, shutting the door just in time for it to fill the windows with an unending void.
I turned and the inside of the house had become my old office, complete with glass dividing walls, funky furniture and vases of orange lilies.
My reflection mirrored me as I traversed the glass corridors.
My suitcase had become a rucksack. I hugged it close to me.
Hadn’t I just left this place or was that a stress dream too?
Knock-knock
I turned to the sound.
Someone was knocking on the other side of a wall.
A wall close to my head. But there was nothing but a bank of desks.
Only now every desk was a black standing desk: those cheaper weighted ones folk put on top of their normal desk, wobbling under the weight of computer monitors and books and mugs, their hinges and springs straining.
The darkness from outside started to leak in through the windows.
My old colleagues bustled around me under the fluorescent lights. They tutted and rolled their eyes at my disorientation. I went looking for my desk, but in its place was a meeting room. Oh, I must not work here yet.
Knock-knock
The noise was louder. Urgent. It came from inside the meeting room. I must be late. I straightened my purse strap across my chest—my rucksack was now a purse—and stepped inside.
The room was barely more than a cupboard. The interview table filled it save for space for one chair on my side and one chair on the other.
The director of my company sat on the other side of the table, her hair perfectly coiffed, eyeliner impeccably winged, fingers with their hot pink nails steepled in front of her face.
My heart immediately began to pound.
She regarded me with a cool glance. I sat in my chair. Perhaps it hadn’t happened, I thought with relief. Maybe it had all been a bad dream.
“What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?” she asked.
Her eyes scanned me up and down as I recited my weaknesses.
Knock-knock-knock!
The knocking was now a constant banging on all the walls around me, which were now made of glass and perfectly black. The darkness from outside had eaten up the rest of the office and all I could see was my own haunted face reflected back at me. I held my hands over my ears to block out the sound.
“What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?” asked the director.
I gestured at the gathering dark.
“Something’s wrong.”
Without blinking or moving her eyes from me, she un-steepled her long elegant fingers and pinched her left pinkie between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
“Do you think you’re a good person?” she asked.
Then with a flick she snapped her little finger in two.