Draft Fragment - Sun 23 October

Crouching, she lifts the metal bucket off the dank paving slab and scrabbles up the flat key with her nail-bitten fingers, her sore fingertips dragging sensitively across grit, sticky web residue, and the dried-out shells of disappointed wood lice. When she steps back outside into the night-black garden, there’s a faint drizzle falling, sharp and chilly against her forehead. When she ducks her head, she sees the drizzle making faint yellow tracks through her failing torch beam.

Getting into Uncle Jan’s house was harder than she’d expected: she’d expected that everything would be well-oiled and maintained, but the lock on the back door was tight and stiff, and the door itself jammed against the bottom of the frame such that she had to lean into it with her shoulder to free it, and push her hip against it to close it once she was inside the utility room the door opened into. She hears herself panting slightly in the darkness, the smell of washing powder and polish in her nostrils.

Eventually, as she pockets her dying torch and feels her way through the kitchen, she realises that it’s probably all right to turn on a light, and she runs her fingertips across smoothly emulsioned plaster board until she finds a bank of four switches projecting proudly from the wall; the first switch she chooses doesn’t seem to do anything, the second one turns on an outside lamp in the garden (revealing a heavier rain falling, white and clear in the cold electric light), but the third switch lights up utility room, kitchen, and the downstairs hallway beyond. Everything seems very still and yellow, and she stands for a moment, hearing the desolate silence of the empty house through the hoarse filter of her own breathing. The kitchen’s striplight is cold and desolately harsh in its reflection on the big kitchen window.

Uncle Jan’s kitchen is spotless: there’s nothing in the sink, nothing on the draining board, and there are only storage jars and electrical appliances on the expensive wooden work surfaces. There are a couple of opened letters in the rack underneath the pin board, but even those are cut open rather than torn, and they have the distinct air of having been dealt with: there’s nothing provisional or undone about anything in this room. She realises that she can hear both the tick of the clock and the echo of the second hand’s precision clacking.

It’s been so long since she was here that she has to consciously reconstruct the geography of the house as she stands at the bottom of the stairs: she makes pointed hand gestures as she orients herself, as if she were a tour guide for particularly dim tourists who needed exaggerated direction. All the doors to the downstairs rooms are closed: blank, white-painted surfaces reflecting the overhead light.

As she puts her foot on the first stair everything starts to come back to her, and her movements become less mechanical: even though the upstairs was another ‘forbidden zone’ – like the shed – she crept up here a lot when the adults were all downstairs in the chilly living room drinking their tea from curlicued china cups with gold rims. The staircase walls are the same colour as back then; a warm, rich pale green, like the skin of a ripe apple with hints of red. It was a colour that always made her want to stroke the wall with her fingers, and she remembers that she did so once and left a three foot long greasy trail that she only noticed when she came back downstairs, and when the light fell at a particular angle; her efforts to remove it – with spit and her handkerchief – only resulted in the creation of a larger stain that was much more obvious from all angles. She’d worried about the stain all the way home, but had then forgotten about it until the next time they’d set out to visit Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette, when she had been wide-eyed with frightened remembrance and anxiety for the whole journey.

Her fingers find the upstairs landing light switch with ease, although it’s lower than her muscle memory recalls. She uses the toilet, which still smells of minty toothpaste and stale water in a plastic tooth mug, and then goes to Uncle Jan’s bedroom to find his nightclothes, the roar and gush of the water pipes still juddering through the house.

The bedroom is pristine, and the wardrobe and drawers painfully tidy and well-ordered: the immaculate layout of uncle Jan’s brown socks and his white string vests and underpants in their moth-balled drawers almost makes her choke with affection: everything is so still and tidy, just like he’d left it this morning, all neat and waiting for him to come home. She notices that the double bed is still made up with pillows for two; she doesn’t look in the sets of drawers on Aunt Mariette’s side of the bed, and which still have a bottle of woman’s perfume set on a doily.

Having put socks, pants, vests, pyjamas, dressing gown, handkerchiefs, toothbrush, flannel and towels into a bag, she goes back along the top landing to the stair head. She pauses with her palm on the gloss-painted balustrade, listening to the thickly-carpeted upstairs silence and thinking about how she used to stand here in the gloomy afternoon light while the adults’ voices rumbled in the sitting room downstairs. Sometimes there would be some light filtering through the net curtains of the room at the end of the landing, edging its way around the angles of the half-closed door and out into the stairwell where it might catch some dust motes drifting in the big space between the lower stairs and the high upstairs ceiling. She would lean her chin against the banister and watch the motes dance, wishing that either (a) she could go home now, where all her things were, or (b) that she could sit in the living room with the adults and impress Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette in some way, so that they would smile at her.

The door to the room at the end of the landing is ajar, and she puts down the bag and pushes the door fully open.

(1040 words)