Chapter 2
The front door opened straight into the main living space, with nothing but a thick musty curtain and a sunken tiled entryway to usher me between outside and in. A practical choice for farmhands, but something I’d need to sort before winter hit.
The ground floor was a single, open-plan room with warped wooden floorboards, blackened with age, and an unpainted, beamed ceiling.
There was no furniture. On the left-hand side was a fireplace with a thick wooden mantel and a stone-clad chimney breast reaching up into the ceiling; on the far edge, a bank of yellowing cabinets made up the kitchen, complete with a small fridge-freezer, an electric stove, and an enamel sink with a faded gingham curtain hiding the space underneath it; then on the right there was a staircase leading up to the first floor.
Under the stairs was a door, cut at an angle to fit the incline. Probably a cupboard. Extra storage.
I took in the alien, lived-in air. It was like going over to a friend’s house as a kid, and finding all the furniture smelled of unfamiliar cooking.
It was small and wonky, and certainly nowhere near insulated enough, but it was a house.
Not a flatshare, not a single-bed apartment close to a ring road.
An actual house. With an upstairs and a downstairs and a garden.
And it was mine.
All the earlier exhaustion and disappointment melted away. I was here. I’d arrived. Home. My new home.
In the far corner I imagined a second-hand dining table.
A round one. I’d put a vase on it and keep it filled with flowers.
In the centre of the room, I saw a sofa, small but plush, covered with a handmade throw.
I could get a TV. I could watch TV in a living room again, and not just on a laptop balanced on the end of my bed.
I envisioned winter with a fire in the hearth and a Christmas tree by the window.
I saw autumn with pinecones on the mantelpiece, a warm pot of tea on the table and golden foliage on the trees outside.
Spring rain. Windows open in summer. The future felt inviting for once, and within my reach.
I left my suitcase in the tiled entrance, slipped off my boots and stepped up onto the floorboards.
And instantly onto something hard and sharp.
Some things in life are clear. Pain, I think, is the clearest. It’s so easy to know you’re in pain. The good kind of pain. The stubbed toe. The snapped bone. The pin or splinter through the arch of your foot.
I fell back into my suitcase, banging the small of my back into the handle and knocking my elbow against the front door.
I lost my balance, put my hurt foot down to stop me from falling onto my side, only to spark another lightning bolt of pain.
I fell anyway, into the entryway, scraping my arms on the edge of the floorboards.
“Fuck. Fucking bastard, fuck!”
Wonderful. First words for my new home. A smashed champagne bottle of curses.
Sat slumped on the edge of the entryway, I checked my foot.
A circle of blood bloomed through the grey wool of my socks.
I’d bought these socks specially for the move.
Something about escaping to the country gave me the idea that I should own more thick woollen socks.
How do you get blood out of wool again? Was it cold water?
Something about baking soda? Whatever had cut me had also torn a hole in the sock, so they were ruined anyway.
I pulled off my sock and took a look at the sole of my foot. It was a small, neat wound. Not as deep as I feared, but it would still need cleaning. Blood wept out of the small pink puncture mark. I made a mental note to google tetanus.
I searched the floorboards for the nail or splinter that had stabbed me. I found a small blotch of blood, but no nail. The blood seeped into a small hole in the wood. I carefully ran my fingertip round its edges. I must have pushed whatever it was under the floor—
A creaking sound broke the silence, as if someone hiding close by had adjusted their position.
I froze.
It came again. My head jerked to the fireplace on my left.
It was coming through the wall.
The neighbour.
Oh God, they must have heard me. Jesus, they probably think a madwoman has moved in next door!
I stood up and watched the wall, like my neighbour might step through the dark mouth of the fireplace at any moment.
The creaking stopped.
I turned back to the bloody hole in the floor. The blood was beginning to coagulate around the rim. I decided to leave it. An offering to whatever small gods ran the place. Let them get a taste of the new kid in town.
I hobbled into the kitchen and, balancing on one leg, angled my foot up and into the enamel sink to clean it under the tap.
I checked the freezer for some ice for my foot.
Inside it was dark and room temperature.
The fridge, too. I looked for a switch on the wall, found one—tacky to the touch—and flicked it, but nothing happened.
I probably had to notify the utility company first. But at least that meant the place had electricity.
It had plug sockets and light switches. I checked the crumpled-up listing.
Electricity, yes, but no gas. I eyed the fireplace.
Perhaps there was a store of firewood somewhere.
I hoped the shower was electric. Not that that would help much until I got the place hooked up.
I leant against the kitchen cupboards. Were all house moves like this?
I felt like I’d been sent back to the start of my adulthood, wondering how everything worked again.
I went up the stairs, angling my foot so as not to get blood on the threadbare runner.
Every wooden step creaked as I climbed. At the top was a small landing with a sloping ceiling.
The first floor was probably a later addition to the cottage, a conversion of some ancient loft or storage space once used to hold firewood, turnips and sacks of barley.
The doors on the first floor were more like the kind you’d see on a garden gate: panels of wood, heavily painted in white gloss and bound together with black iron braces and hinges.
The handles were fist-sized black iron rings that I had to pull and twist to raise the latch on the other side.
They shrieked like a banshee. No robber would be silently sneaking into my room late at night.
The door directly at the top of the stairs opened into a tiny bathroom tucked under the eaves with a single PVC skylight looking up at the powder-blue sky.
I could probably see the fields behind the cottage if I went up on tiptoes, but from this angle it felt like the window of a space capsule, only instead of stars there was a great blue void, a bottomless ocean of clouds and sky.
I half believed that if I jumped into it, I’d be falling upwards forever.
There was an avocado sink and a bath with a shower attachment. Due to the sloping ceilings, there was no way to turn it into a full stand-up shower. I would have to kneel or sit curled up inside the bath to use it.
More importantly, there was no electric shower.
I turned the hot water tap on at the sink and waited with my hand under it.
It coughed a few remaining air bubbles from the long dormant pipes, sputtered, then ran a steady stream of clean but cold water.
I waited, but it wouldn’t heat up. I checked the listing again.
Under “Bathroom” it just stated, “shower bath”.
No mention of any kind of water heating.
I flicked to the back page with the list of stuff that made my eyes blur every time I’d tried to read it and searched for any mention of heating or boiler.
“Biomass heating system” it read.
What exactly did “Biomass heating system” mean?
I’d assumed it was just gas or electricity that was generated through some fancy scientific means, like a car that ran on grubs or banana peels.
I saw this special energy being pumped into the building, a green pipe filled with clean white light, untouched by any exploitation or pollution.
I hadn’t interrogated any of those thoughts, hadn’t identified them as thoughts I was thinking, until just then.
Now I noticed the euphemistic tone of it.
“Biomass heating system”. I think it was the word “system” that did it.
I thought I’d seen a coal scuttle by the fireplace downstairs.
I imagined myself heating water over a coal fire and carrying it upstairs. Where would I even buy coal from?
I looked in the small mirror over the sink, once again hoping a different view might change the facts.
But in my reflection, all I saw was my tired face, my hair falling out of the hasty ponytail I’d thrown it into, and the sad cold water tumbling out of the tap.
I turned it off and left the bathroom, firmly closing the door behind me.
I stood out on the landing and sighed.
Okay, bedroom, don’t let me down.
The bedroom was everything my five-year-old self would have loved.
The sloping ceiling gave it the internal structure of a large tent, the kind I would have filled with books and cushions and blankets, hidden away from where anyone could find me.
There was another skylight to the back of the house with views across the rolling fields behind, and a small window to the front, hooded by the gabled eave that had so reminded me of an eyebrow at first glance.
Unlike in 1a, my upstairs window had no curtains.
No blinds, no shutters, nothing. That was going to be a pain, what with the long summer nights. I added it to my mental checklist.
White painted cupboards promised storage under the eaves, which was good because I had no idea where I’d put a wardrobe.
Anything taller than a chest of drawers would have to take up prime real estate in the middle of the room.
I reached up a hand and touched the beams ribbing the space.
That was alright. I’d never been good at fashion.
A few jeans and jumpers, plus a nice shirt or two, would do me fine.
It’s not like I was expecting invitations to balls and fancy dinners.
The previous occupant had left a mattress behind, thank God.
No bedframe, mind. Just a mattress on the floor.
But at least I wouldn’t have to sleep on the bare wooden boards.
I hadn’t budgeted much for furniture. Tables and sofas I could do without for now, but a missing bed would be a problem.
The mattress didn’t look too old, and there were no obviously dodgy stains.
I bent down to give it a cautious sniff. Maybe I wouldn’t have to replace it.
After a cursory bounce or two on the mattress, I nosed through the cupboards under the eaves, thinking about what I could fill them with.
Linen, books, secret treasures. Inside one was a clotheshorse, lying on its side on the floor, spindly and at ease, completely unfolded.
The last occupant must have stashed it here after putting away a load of dried washing.
It was a weird choice to have it unfolded in the cupboard.
God knows how they even got it inside. They would have had to fold it, then unfold it again.
Let’s not look a gift clotheshorse in the mouth, har har.
I snorted at my own joke then reached in to pull the clotheshorse out.
As I folded the mechanism, images flashed before my eyes.
Fluorescent light. Laughter. Hot pink nail polish.
The muscles in my arms tensed.
Stop it now, I scolded myself. It’s just a clotheshorse.
A normal thing. A boring thing. An inoffensive thing. A thing of chores and Sunday afternoons and ugh-I-can’t-believe-I-forgot-to-put-a-wash-on. Something not to think about. A nothing kind of thing.
But the more I tried not to think about it, that motion of folding, the more it kept coming to me.
A startled gasp.
Silence.
Then that awful scream.
I slammed the cupboard shut. The clotheshorse clanged on the other side of the door.
Look, you can’t even see it anymore, I thought. It’s just a shut door. Stop being stupid!
But behind the door I knew it was there. Its folds neatly snapped shut.
I sat on the mattress and picked at my nails. My legs bounced, the movement building into some bodily action outside of my conscious control.
I got back up.
I pulled the clotheshorse out of the cupboard, trying my best not to look at it.
Then I half-jogged, half-jumped back down the stairs, yanked the front door open like a screaming mouth and exited the house.
I had to get it out of my home, out of my sight.
I strode down the steps, looking for somewhere to dispose of the horrid thing.
Next to the driveway was a patch of bramble just before the woods.
There, that would do. I threw the clotheshorse toward the trees.
My aim was off.
It slipped out of my hands and into the windscreen of my car, instantly spiderwebbing the whole thing with cracks and shards.
Then it bounced lightly away, spiralled like a gymnast, like a mischievous Norse god, and disappeared into the bright May foliage, swallowed up by the countryside and all that green.
My car’s alarm broke the birdsong peace of the countryside around me.
I stared at the broken windscreen with dismay.
I checked back up at 1a. Nothing. Not even a curtain flicker.
I turned off the alarm, grabbed the rest of my bags and hurried back inside the house.