1

Early mornings were the only time that Toby felt that his house belonged to him. Everyone was still sleeping. There was no imminent possibility of a key in the door, of footsteps down the stairs, of voices carrying through walls. It was just him, in his pyjamas, sieving flour into a bowl, tap, tap, tap, against the palm of his hand.

Toby made bread every morning. It was a ritual, something that Karen had done every day when they were together. The first morning after she left he’d come downstairs and immediately started pounding dough, desperate to re-create the scent of his failed marriage. He didn’t even eat it any more, just left it on a cooling tray every day for his tenants to enjoy.

Toby had slept badly and his usual sense of melancholy was now overlaid by a thick blanket of tiredness. It was three days into the New Year and life had already fallen flaccidly back into place. He was still trapped in this mausoleum of a house, still surrounded by people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He was still married to a woman whom he hadn’t seen since he was twenty-five. He was still an unpublished poet and he was still penniless.

A pile of bills sat on his desk upstairs, unopened and unpaid. Next to the pile of bills was a pile of rejection letters from publishers and literary agents. And next to that was a letter from a local estate agent informing him that there were people queuing down the street, apparently, to buy a house like his and enclosing examples of houses the agent had sold recently for unseemly amounts of money. While Toby was grateful to them for alerting him to this fact, it was really of no possible use to him. Toby’s house was full of people who had no intention of leaving and he had no intention of making them.

Toby finished making his dough and pressed it into a loaf tin, which he then slid into the Aga. He could hear the tinny drone of someone’s radio alarm switching itself on upstairs and he headed quickly back towards his room, before he inadvertently crossed paths with anyone. He glanced at things as he passed through the house. A pair of Con’s trainers sat under the coffee table in the TV room, with his socks curled up inside them like sleeping dogs. There was a copy of Now magazine on the arm of the sofa and a mug half full of blotchy tea on the floor. Ruby’s black lacy cardigan was hanging from the back of the armchair and Joanne’s Clarins face powder sat in a little plastic pot on the coffee table next to Ruby’s cereal bowl. A small plastic Christmas tree with multicoloured fibre-optic tips twinkled forlornly in the early morning gloom. A pair of Ruby’s pointy boots lay by the door, one upright, the other on its side, as if it had fallen over drunk. Toby picked up one of the boots and stared at it longingly.

This was his world, had been for years. A world of other people’s possessions, rhythms, dramas, smells and habits. His presence left no imprint on the dynamics of his home. It was as if he didn’t exist. What would it be like to live alone, he wondered, to come home and find everything as he’d left it? To never have to take someone else’s unwashed saucepan out of the kitchen sink to pour himself a glass of water, never to be woken up by the sound of someone else’s snoring or someone else’s lovemaking? To know people only as they presented themselves to the world, not to see the ragged, domestic underbelly of strangers any more. Would he feel more substantial? Would he feel more alive?

He climbed the two flights of stairs to his room, three at a time, and closed the door silently behind him.